Saturday, November 29, 2014

Major tiering changes + Mega Salamence quickbanned

The most immediate change is that Mega Rayquaza is banned from ubers with immediate effect. As a result, since Smogon wants all Pokémon, even Mega Rayquaza, to be usable somewhere, a new metagame called "Anything Goes" (AG) was created, which allows Mega Rayquaza, OHKO moves, Moody, evasion, sleep spam, you name it. The only rule that applies is Endless Battle Clause. A few policies are going to be put into effect to determine whether something deserves to be shifted into AG, but nothing more than the few things mentioned above will be exclusive to it for the time being. For example, Xerneas is explicitly mentioned as something that's not even close to meeting the criteria for being banned. It's not in a different power bracket from other ubers, it has the standard BST, but an extremely useful typing and the most brutal setup move. One thing I'm REALLY looking forward to seeing is whether Darkrai will be insanely dominant in AG with Sleep Clause gone, and whether Articuno can do anything with Mind Reader + Sheer Cold allowed.

It's important to note that the line between ubers and OU will NOT be determined by usage, like the other tier boundaries. So an uber that sees less than 3.41% usage but breaks OU will STILL be considered uber, instead of some transition tier like BL, BL2, BL3, etc.

Also, Mega Salamence was quickbanned from OU, for very obvious reasons. It has unreasonable bulk allowing it to set up with Dragon Dance with impunity, and then Aerilate Return/Frustration spam just became stupidly powerful. Add Salamence's excellent movepool for taking out those things that can survive the Return/Frustration onslaught, and you have a metagame where Porygon2 is virtually the only Pokémon that can switch into it easily, and every team has to run obscure crap like said Porygon2, HP Ice Rotom-W, or Cresselia. So the outcome was fairly obvious.

22 comments:

  1. So AG is pretty much old ubers?
    I dunno why all this hassle

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    1. Old ubers had Sleep Clause, Species Clause, no OHKOs, no evasion, no Moody, etc. AG has none of this shit. It's basically "Mega Rayquaza is so crazy broken, we're just going to allow you to throw everything at it. We give up, you win, Gamefreak."

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    2. Hue, so it acutally has just no rules besides the endless battle rule, I can't wait for 6 team M-Rayqauaza battles

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    3. Uh... no? The one mega per team restriction is something that's found in the actual game, it's not a Smogon clause. So you can still use only one mega (which WILL be Rayquaza, naturally).

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    4. Well, I guess I become ignorant about Pokemon for not playing it for about 2 years, any-whom this looks interesting, may go back and check it out

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  2. AG sounds like the worst thing ever. Gen 1 with Mewtwo could look tame and balanced in comparison. It'll be like a Hall of Fame of GameFreak's worst decisions.

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    1. Of course, I understand that the point is to stop ubers from being that bad, so I guess it's necessary.

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    2. Still, it'll be fun to give it a try for a day, and you'll at least have around a 50% win rate.

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  3. It's done. The one-two punch of the Shadow Tag kerfuffle and Mega Ray broke Ubers. So it looks like what is effectively gen V-style StreetMons will become semi-official, and Ubers is cemented as a tournament tier first and foremost. I am glad Smogon's philosophy of the Uber tier is finally getting looked at seriously, and some people were calling for this type of split to happen for a while now. Ubers is essentially the same as before, but now there is a good reason to have a Pokémon (forme) banned entirely. Kind of like what would have happened if Shadow Tag was banned after all. Overall, I am pleased with this decision. Good on chaos for stepping up to the plate!

    Predictions on the new Anything Goes metagame: Mega Rayquaza is pretty dang good and should handily dominate the usage stats, but Moody Smeargle will prove to be the real monster in the end. Darkrai will get a fair amount of use at first, but people will soon learn how to deal with it. Deoxys-S offense will be bog-standard, and don't expect Shadow Tag to get any use at all.. By the way, if anyone is wondering how good Mind Reader+Sheer Cold Articuno/Lapras will be, don't get your hopes up. Sheer Cold spam is statistically better than going for the Mind Reader first anyways, so expect to see better stuff like Kyogre doing the OHKOing.

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    1. Apparently they tested whether to get rid of Sleep Clause at some point, and people were so prepared for Darkrai it was VENOMOTH of all things that tore through teams.

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    2. That's pretty funny, actually.
      I find it hilarious when people over-prepare for something very specific and find out that by doing this they neglected to be prepared for something else that would have been meaningless in any other cases. Happens a lot in Monster Hunter too. XD

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    3. Crippling overspecialization. Use Mega Mewtwo Y or something with Magic Bounce or a Lum Berry so Darkrai can't put something to sleep, or use Mega Rayquaza to blitz everything...

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    4. Magic Bounce is probably going to end up being one of the dominant forces as a whole. Puts a stop to those 6x Swagplay Klefki teams like you wouldn't believe.

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    5. So...Espeon and Xatu so they can still use Mega Rayquaza...

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  4. We haven't had such a massive tiering shift in the entire time I've been following the metagame (since gen 4). Looks like Pokemon is becoming Power Creep: The Game.

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    1. Is becoming? It's been the case since the start. Remember how horrible many OU movepools were back in gen 1?

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    2. Basically almost everyone but Starmie for the most dominant ones...

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    3. True enough. I more meant that we're on an exponential increase rather than a linear one. The power leaps in each successive generation get greater and greater.

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  5. Now just watch. Gen 7 comes and they do away with Mega Stones completely, allowing ALL Mega Pokemon to be able to hold an item and the meta game gets beyond broken.

    In serious though, I really doubt that would happen, but if it ever did... the Meta game would shatter. Could you imagine Mega Beedrill with a Life Orb? Or Mega Latias/Latios holding Soul Dew? Especially the latter, they would be beyond broken.

    I'm saying this partly because of Mega Rayquaza. Something tells me Mega Rayquaza was a 'test' to see if a method of mega evolving without a Mega Stone would work.

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    1. Instead it just ended up wrecking everything, which is why I think they wont do it, even if it was a test

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  6. On a slightly related note I've been wondering about Nintendo's official tournaments. Specifically one specific pokemon and that pokemon is Deoxys.

    The reason I'm thinking about it is this. Nintendo seems to allow legendary pokemon with BST's of 600 (( with the odd exception of Zygarde, maybe because its part of their blanket ruleset and Zygarde is related to Xerneas/Yveltal )). Previously Deoxys was a pokemon only given away at events and normally pokemon that were only given away at events weren't allowed to compete in these official tournaments. It's the same reason Mew, Celebi, Jirachi etc, are banned.

    Of course now that's different. Deoxys has lost its "event only" status with it being freely available in OR/AS. Does that mean that Deoxys could be allowed in future tournaments or will Deoxys remain banned? Remember, when Rotom first got its forms they were banned as an "event only" thing but when they became freely available without events they were unbanned.

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