I'm going to use this as a place to drop off some dog thoughts for the good and not so good people of ru. From what I can gather there is definitely a ton of resentment towards the state of the tier, and to me it was pretty obvious that the great times were over when doublade/gligar were looking to bounce to uu. As I outlined before
here, I don't feel zygarde at all is warranting a ban. While it's very easy to say 'no tarrows resist ban tarrows' there is a boatload of counterplay at our disposal that either A) isn't being fully utilized or B) is being ignored simply because it isn't hard countering zydoge on all fronts. It's easier to start with naming the best counters, so I'll start there.
Golisopod, slowbro, cresselia, defensive mandibuzz, and more or less everything I named last time in the link above all handle zygarde as well as one could hope. But even in a non-full on counter sense, there are plenty of viable cores within the meta that handle zygarde. ie a grass type+steel type, or anything else that can bait tarrows since most wouldn't hard rage into grasses just to get potentially stuck vs fat steels that would cripple zydoge. An incredible amount of mons beat zydoge 1v1 or cripple it enough to where 1 of our 80 priority mons can take it out later. Salazzle, noiv, rhyp, araq, m-stoise, shuca m-gross, literally any ice type in the tier, just about any scarfer in the tier, aero, shaymin, tsareena, swellow, ribombee, donphan, and others are all beating it straight up from an offensive standpoint. most of them outspeed/priority kill to where taking a hit isn't huge. this isn't a small number of mons. I refuse to believe going down the path we did in oras is the correct one, and this ultimately feels like a knee-jerk reaction to an unwelcoming and admittedly less adequate metagame, where we rush to diagnose what needs to be banned, yet in reality it won't at all fix the issues we're having.
As to what we do need to do to improve the tier, i'm really not sure. I can definitely say I'm more adjusted after a few weeks and the autolosses on mu people are harping on are usually not so sinister. I think it's fair to say everything I've seen in this meta is noticeably weak to something, it's definitely a more fast and loose offensive timeline we're in. That being said, I don't believe it's so bad to the point that it's 'playing the lottery' or other catch phrases I've seen floating around. I don't think I'd suspect anything fwiw. Zygarde is 23rd in usage for spl through 6 weeks, with a 40% winrate. While that's just 1 anecdotal stat, I'd definitely like to go into detail with these replays to explain what I mean, since they're considered the highest level of play to offer. In
this game, KW's zygarde was pretty much a non-factor. It was completely walled by tangela (a defensive mon i didn't name above), but on top of that it was threatened by stoutland outspeeding in sand. To top it all off, it got scared out vs shuca metagross where it most definitely lost in that specific mu. Meanwhile in
this game between Diogo and Kingler, it raged into a sash roserade. Even if it wasn't sash, it'd instantly have been revenged by golisopod or bronzong (though it's worth pointing out pod would have likely came in imo if not sashed). It didn't have to luxury to tarrows because of pod, and it
really didn't have the luxury to rage either. You can look through most of the teams this spl even where zygarde didn't show, and see that they have multiple viable routes of counterplay. And it isn't 'haha well look they need all these doge counters', they're mostly viable teams that simply function while allowing for dog counterplay, like any good team should in this meta.
