if you don't play the tier and aren't, to my knowledge, at all involved in the community, then please leave tiering decisions and discussion to the people who actually have a stake. While I do not always agree, the community has decided time and again that baton pass is worth preserving as an enabler of offensive strategies. In my opinion, the fullpass strategy is not good in its heavily nerfed form, and further action - be it a sand attack ban, speedpass ban, or swagger ban - is not necessary, and I think that most people agree that baton pass is not broken anymore.
I agree with the sentiment some have expressed here that we have to stop somewhere, and in my mind we are already there. While sand attack and flash don't commonly see competitive use, it is possible that they might in the future. Swagger sees more-than-0 usage as a last move on endeavor swampert, and that to me makes it wrong to ban. The community has decided against a speedpass ban many times before and likely will again.
Sand attack should be looked at outside of its usage on baton pass teams, because as a hit to baton pass it will likely be very ineffective. If the concept of lowering your opponent's accuracy is banworthy then we should ban it, and if baton pass is the problem we should be looking elsewhere. Notably, if we really want to split hairs, we can adjust baton pass clause to be "stat-altering moves" rather than "stat-boosting moves".
I don't think there would be significant opposition to banning brightpowder as an extension of evasion clause. While I do think, in some niche scenarios, it could be the best item to use (certain smeargle sets, probably) I doubt anyone cares enough about that to try and preserve the item. I think king's rock (not within the scope of the thread but related) has a niche on houndoom, charizard, and maybe dugtrio and should remain in the tier.
Anyway, for the third time, that's my two cents, so I suppose you've all got six of them now. Have a nice day everybody, and let's look forward to some quality games this spl.
EDIT: replying to the post below mine, I'd rather not flood the thread with a back-and-forth.
Karxrida said:
Yes, I understand each Generarion is different and has its own standards, but a lot of people don't know that and continue to propose bad complex bans in the OU discussions.
In what way is this different from what you are doing now? Because you think your ideas are good and these other peoples' are bad? Baton pass adds a certain dynamic to ADV OU that our community is loathe to part with. And to reiterate, banning ninjask isn't going to do anything, in my opinion, because zapdos is already better than ninjask at passing speed due to threatening almost all of the phazers in the tier. This is the kind of thing that we don't need to spend much time on if the people involved in the conversation already are familiar with the workings of the tier. But I digress and this is already far-enough removed from the purpose of the thread. I hope everyone reading this is having a nice day.