Remember when HGSS came out, and a big fuss was made over Head Smash Aggron? It was the trendy pokemon of the moment, because it possessed the power to straight-up OHKO moderately-bulky neutral offensive mons, a feat uncommon if not unheard-of at the time. Now fast forward to BW2, and virtually every respectable OU powerhouse can claim the same. The crazy power surge of BW has, perhaps rightly, very much desensitised the competitive community to pokemon that carry a level of offensive power that is problematic or detrimental to the metagame. Terrakion was one example of this, and it seems this thread is heading towards a consensus that, with Scarf or Expert Belt, Keldeo becomes just another of the many Very Good Pokemon that collectively are far too ubiquitous and far too widely-accepted to do anything about.
I'd agree with this conclusion actually. Scarf Keldeo may be very damaging to offense, and Expert Belt reduces the number of Keldeo's counters even further, but they are nothing unique, in that these are exactly the qualities you'd hope and expect to ascribe to a fast, powerful offensive threat when holding these two items. To my mind, this pony's real trick is the near-inescapable devastation that it can cause with just a single move on its Choice Specs set. Just to be clear, in the rest of this post I'll be talking about Specs Keldeo's damage output with the assumption that Drizzle is active. I think this is not an unfair condition to expect, as Drizzle is undeniably the easiest weather to sustain, and its inducer is the most common in OU.
I'll try and be direct, since this may be a long post: my opinion that Keldeo needs to be banned comes down to the fact that no resist in OU (outside of SpD Tentacruel and this hipster Latias set I've been using) can adequately handle Specs Keldeo. And no, I'm not excluding lower-tier resists like Amoonguss and Slowking, so for once the solution isn't "be more creative"; Specs Keldeo can 2HKO every single one of them, with rocks up, most with Hydro Pump alone. (I feel almost tempted to drop in a calc for Amoonguss, since many posters in this thread don't seem to realise just how absurdly powerful Hydro Pump is -- yes, it is 2HKOd over half of the time). The few resists that can reliably tank two Hydro Pumps become useless should they make just one mistake -- switching into a coverage move and being threatened with a 2HKO, or failing to use a recovery move on the turn that Keldeo switches out -- or take a tiny bit or prior damage, as they then cannot safely switch into Hydro Pump when Keldeo returns. Even the 12.5% of residual damage from switching into Stealth Rock is enough that any OU water resist can be 2HKOd by Hydro Pump the next time it tries to block Keldeo's attack.
Lati@s both fall to a similar fate: even if not hit by Icy Wind or Hidden Power, Keldeo's 'best check', LO Latias, is nothing more than a one-time switch. It takes far more damage from Hydro Pump and SR than it can recover in the turn that Keldeo switches out -- so much in fact that even without rocks, Modest Keldeo (which is entirely viable) can one-shot it the next time it comes in. Latios comes uncomfortably close to being OHKOd after rocks by Modest Specs Hydro Pump the first time it pokes its head round the corner.
The result of all this is that any team not carrying a water immunity is weak to Specs Keldeo, as nothing but a water immunity can make it unprofitable for Keldeo to spam its most powerful attack. Nothing short of a water immunity can switch into Hydro Pump after taking so much as one extra round of SR damage. Therefore, in order to adequately handle this one move of this one set of this one pokemon, an OU player can choose between a grand total of three viable pokemon. And if that pokemon is Gastrodon or offensive Toxicroak, you'd better have a backup fighting resist/immunity to sponge Keldeo's second move. Teams are forced to choose from one of the three water immunities, primarily to handle Keldeo -- if this isn't the very archetype of a 'centralising' pokemon, then I honestly do not know what is. Put simply: resists mean shit to Keldeo.
If you aren't convinced by 'centralisation' arguments (although I don't see why you shouldn't be, given the evidence), personally I feel that a pokemon with a move that 2HKOs its bulkiest resists is unhealthy for the metagame because it undermines the very operation or mechanism by which competitive battling is possible, namely tactical switching. Reduced down to its simplest form, competitive pokemon can be compared to rock-paper-scissors. If it turns out that scissors not only beats paper, but also rock despite being nominally resisted by it, then something is very wrong. It would be meaningless to call such a game 'competitive', as the pool of counters to scissors has been whittled down to zero. Proportionally, Specs Keldeo achieves a similar thing; its sheer power removes its would-be counters and checks, until all that's left is a thimbleful of 'exceptions'. In doing so, it compromises the balance of the metagame and reduces the very possibility of having, or switching into a counter. In case anybody's wondering, yes I would level the same criticism at Darmanitan, but the comparitively low popularity of Darm and its favourite weather mean that it currently does not have this effect on the metagame, though it well could.
In this post, I have not discussed the small things that make Keldeo more suited to performing its role than Darm and others, and more able in practice to fulfil its devastating theorymon potential -- its critical base 108 Spe, it's SR resist, its Pursuit resist, its priority resists, its outstanding offensive and defensive typing, its lack of a 'lock-in' move that would facilitate revenge killing, its favourable matchup against all unfavourable weather-setters, etc.
I haven't talked about the ways in which Specs Keldeo can easily break even these water immunities, from Hidden Power to simple Spikes support.
I haven't mentioned the other sets that Keldeo can run, which deal with these defensive threats more confidently, while the defending team is simultaneously expected to prepare for Specs Keldeo as well.
I haven't opined on how much (subjectively) better the suspect ladder was than the OU ladder, owing to the varied team structures that are currently made unviable by Keldeo alone.
But were it not for any of these factors, I would still be voting to ban Keldeo. Even if there was no possibility of other Keldeo sets, I would be happy to vote ban on the Specs damage alone and the centralisation it necessitates, and would feel I had made the right choice in doing so. I'm so sorry for the tl;dr post, but I'm a little late to this discussion and to see so many people wandering over to the side of "no ban" is a tiny bit frightening at this late stage!
I'd agree with this conclusion actually. Scarf Keldeo may be very damaging to offense, and Expert Belt reduces the number of Keldeo's counters even further, but they are nothing unique, in that these are exactly the qualities you'd hope and expect to ascribe to a fast, powerful offensive threat when holding these two items. To my mind, this pony's real trick is the near-inescapable devastation that it can cause with just a single move on its Choice Specs set. Just to be clear, in the rest of this post I'll be talking about Specs Keldeo's damage output with the assumption that Drizzle is active. I think this is not an unfair condition to expect, as Drizzle is undeniably the easiest weather to sustain, and its inducer is the most common in OU.
I'll try and be direct, since this may be a long post: my opinion that Keldeo needs to be banned comes down to the fact that no resist in OU (outside of SpD Tentacruel and this hipster Latias set I've been using) can adequately handle Specs Keldeo. And no, I'm not excluding lower-tier resists like Amoonguss and Slowking, so for once the solution isn't "be more creative"; Specs Keldeo can 2HKO every single one of them, with rocks up, most with Hydro Pump alone. (I feel almost tempted to drop in a calc for Amoonguss, since many posters in this thread don't seem to realise just how absurdly powerful Hydro Pump is -- yes, it is 2HKOd over half of the time). The few resists that can reliably tank two Hydro Pumps become useless should they make just one mistake -- switching into a coverage move and being threatened with a 2HKO, or failing to use a recovery move on the turn that Keldeo switches out -- or take a tiny bit or prior damage, as they then cannot safely switch into Hydro Pump when Keldeo returns. Even the 12.5% of residual damage from switching into Stealth Rock is enough that any OU water resist can be 2HKOd by Hydro Pump the next time it tries to block Keldeo's attack.
Lati@s both fall to a similar fate: even if not hit by Icy Wind or Hidden Power, Keldeo's 'best check', LO Latias, is nothing more than a one-time switch. It takes far more damage from Hydro Pump and SR than it can recover in the turn that Keldeo switches out -- so much in fact that even without rocks, Modest Keldeo (which is entirely viable) can one-shot it the next time it comes in. Latios comes uncomfortably close to being OHKOd after rocks by Modest Specs Hydro Pump the first time it pokes its head round the corner.
The result of all this is that any team not carrying a water immunity is weak to Specs Keldeo, as nothing but a water immunity can make it unprofitable for Keldeo to spam its most powerful attack. Nothing short of a water immunity can switch into Hydro Pump after taking so much as one extra round of SR damage. Therefore, in order to adequately handle this one move of this one set of this one pokemon, an OU player can choose between a grand total of three viable pokemon. And if that pokemon is Gastrodon or offensive Toxicroak, you'd better have a backup fighting resist/immunity to sponge Keldeo's second move. Teams are forced to choose from one of the three water immunities, primarily to handle Keldeo -- if this isn't the very archetype of a 'centralising' pokemon, then I honestly do not know what is. Put simply: resists mean shit to Keldeo.
If you aren't convinced by 'centralisation' arguments (although I don't see why you shouldn't be, given the evidence), personally I feel that a pokemon with a move that 2HKOs its bulkiest resists is unhealthy for the metagame because it undermines the very operation or mechanism by which competitive battling is possible, namely tactical switching. Reduced down to its simplest form, competitive pokemon can be compared to rock-paper-scissors. If it turns out that scissors not only beats paper, but also rock despite being nominally resisted by it, then something is very wrong. It would be meaningless to call such a game 'competitive', as the pool of counters to scissors has been whittled down to zero. Proportionally, Specs Keldeo achieves a similar thing; its sheer power removes its would-be counters and checks, until all that's left is a thimbleful of 'exceptions'. In doing so, it compromises the balance of the metagame and reduces the very possibility of having, or switching into a counter. In case anybody's wondering, yes I would level the same criticism at Darmanitan, but the comparitively low popularity of Darm and its favourite weather mean that it currently does not have this effect on the metagame, though it well could.
In this post, I have not discussed the small things that make Keldeo more suited to performing its role than Darm and others, and more able in practice to fulfil its devastating theorymon potential -- its critical base 108 Spe, it's SR resist, its Pursuit resist, its priority resists, its outstanding offensive and defensive typing, its lack of a 'lock-in' move that would facilitate revenge killing, its favourable matchup against all unfavourable weather-setters, etc.
I haven't talked about the ways in which Specs Keldeo can easily break even these water immunities, from Hidden Power to simple Spikes support.
I haven't mentioned the other sets that Keldeo can run, which deal with these defensive threats more confidently, while the defending team is simultaneously expected to prepare for Specs Keldeo as well.
I haven't opined on how much (subjectively) better the suspect ladder was than the OU ladder, owing to the varied team structures that are currently made unviable by Keldeo alone.
But were it not for any of these factors, I would still be voting to ban Keldeo. Even if there was no possibility of other Keldeo sets, I would be happy to vote ban on the Specs damage alone and the centralisation it necessitates, and would feel I had made the right choice in doing so. I'm so sorry for the tl;dr post, but I'm a little late to this discussion and to see so many people wandering over to the side of "no ban" is a tiny bit frightening at this late stage!
