Okay, personally, I think the main problems in the metagame right now are the fact that we have many, many good sweepers that have very few things checking them. Apart from Blaziken and Garchomp, who I think should be banned outright, a lot of sweepers are only held back by one or two checks. The biggest issue is that
most of these checks are easily removed by Chandelure. I've made a list of these before, and I'll reiterate that here just for convenience:
Pokemon in italics cannot hold Shed Shell, or would be extremely disadvantaged beyond losing Leftovers/Life Orb/Berry to hold Shed Shell (mostly Eviolite mons):
Choice Scarf can trap:
- Skarmory
- Ferrothorn
- Scizor
- Jellicent
- Reuniclus
- Latias
- Slowbro
- Forretress
- Tangrowth
- Breloom
- Dusclops
- Serperior
- Virizion
- Lucario
- Heracross
- Jirachi
- Celebi
- Magnezone
- Metagross
- Sableye
- Mew
- Genesect
- Amoonguss
- Dragonite
- Salamence
- Venusaur
- Gliscor
- Hippowdon
- Garchomp
- Gastrodon
- Quagsire
Sub/CM can trap:
- Blissey /
Chansey
-
Porygon2 (to an extent)
SunnyBeam can trap:
- Politoed
- Pretty much ALL bulky Waters
- Some Tyranitar
Again, this is like half the tier. If you remove a Breloom or Gliscor, Excadrill gets a very easy sweep. If you remove something like Gastrodon, NP Thunder Wave Thundurus gets to virtually broken levels. You can use the SunnyBeamer set to easily win a weather war for your sun team. I know we haven't been using the clauses for a while, but it's good to go back and revisit them since they are still helpful. Chandelure fits the Support Characteristic like freaking glove.
Support Characteristic
A Pokémon is uber if, in common battle conditions, it can consistently set up a situation in which it makes it substantially easier for other pokemon to sweep.
Now, whether it's Chandelure's fault for being able to trap these checks and leading to out of control Pokemon or whether it's these Pokemon's fault for having too few checks is another debate, I really think whatever the cause, this is unhealthy. I feel like I'm playing Ubers when I play DW, except you know, without Ubers. Sure, each threat is loosely checked by something else just like in Ubers, but this is not what we're after. Personally, I don't care, because I like playing Ubers, but why should I play DW when I can just play Ubers? We are trying reach a balanced metagame. So, I reckon we should either:
1) Ban Chandelure and see how things turn out or 2)
Ban a whole bunch of sweepers. Personally, I like the "ban Chandelure" route better, since it's so much easier to implement. I'll get to that reasoning now:
Why ban Chandelure?
- Well, I've already gone through how it traps and kills common checks to the big sweepers like Excadrill, Terrakion, Keldeo, Dragonite, Manaphy, etc.
Counter arguments:
1) Stick Shed Shell on your most important checks. I have answered to this before, but I guess for the formality, I'll do it again. Firstly, there are many, many threats that are rampant in DW. This means that you'll likely require more than one check to deal with most of them. Since Chandelure can remove most of these checks, if you REALLY want to guarantee the safety of these checks, you're going to have to run a resist berry or Shed Shell on them. This is very impractical, and in a lot of cases, detrimental to how a Pokemon functions. I know Shed Shell is the most used item on Ferrothorn these days. I use it too on my rain team, and it plain sucks! It is so much harder to make Ferrothorn defend without Leftovers. Just by
being there, Chandelure has reduced the effectiveness of walls. It would also be impractical to run a Shed Shell on your bulky Politoed, too, since that's just ridiculous, but you may have to do it if you don't want SunnyBeaming Chandelure from easily winning the weather war for you.
2) The "one-for-one" argument - Not going to lie now, I hate this argument, because it really shows you're not thinking hard enough. Yes, the common scenario is something like "Chandelure traps and OHKOs Gliscor with Hidden Power Ice, Tyranitar comes in and kills Chandelure with Pursuit, 1 for 1, fair trade". Again, Chandelure is NOT a sweeper. I'm not interested in
how many Pokemon it kills, it's
what it kills. By removing Gliscor, Chandelure would have removed possibly the only reliable check on the opposing team to Excadrill or Terrakion, or whatever. Sure, you may have a secondary check, but it's not going to stand up to Excadrill with a tiny bit of smart play. So, the sort of situation that arises is that after Tyranitar kills Chandelure with Pursuit, in comes Excadrill, sets up a Swords Dance and you are now shitting bricks because your one reliable check to Excadrill just got itself destroyed by Chandelure. It's not just the easy 1v1 swap any more. Sure, I've heard Tobes say that every good team has more than 1 check to Excadrill, but is that really practical? Yes, you are carrying Gliscor, but I bet you that your secondary check is rather flimsy compared to Gliscor. It's like chess, if I have a whole cascade of pawns on one side of the board where I'm clearly dominant and you have the same number of pawns that are blocked, I'd very willingly swap Queens, Rooks, Bishops, whatever to force an endgame where it would be easy for me to just promote a pawn and win. Looking at Chandelure getting trapped and removed as a material trade is just too simple and does not tell you the entire story. I've played many, many games where I've willingly sac'd mons or kept opposing mons alive (eg Chansey) so I can pull off a sweep afterwards. You must look at the big picture with these things.
Okay, I'm also for banning Blaziken and Garchomp, but I think I'll stop for now, I've typed enough for one sitting.