destinyunknown
Banned deucer.
I do not understand the OU council’s decision here. The reason given to suspect Magearna instead of Cinderace is that “we haven’t had time to get used to Cinderace”, but that doesn’t make any sense! Libero Cinderace has been around for almost 2 months now (so about 15 days MORE than magearna has been). And don’t give me the “magearna is a gen7 Pokemon”, there’s been way too many changes and that experience is irrelevant.
We’ve experienced Cinderace in both the pre-DLC and post-DLC metas, and he was insane in both. Having laddered and practiced a lot for WCop (and to get these reqs), I’ve always found Cinderace to be more restrictive to teambuilding as well as a stronger presence in every game. There’s basically no way to deal with Cinderace + volt switch cores other than using your own Cinderace + volt switch core. Rocky helmet sort of works but they always get knocked off and other support (spikes, wish) make it unreliable.
In short my experience playing against cinderace is that there’s 3 ways to win against it:
1) Have your own Cinderace
2) Hope for misses
3) Pray that your opponent is an idiot
It reminds me of how bs Genesect was in BW OU, it’s that stupid.
As for magearna, I agree it’s very strong, but its speed make it so you have a fighting chance against it. You can just choose to play a team that’s faster, and/or include one of its counters in your team (toxapex, Scizor, volcarona, Rotom-h all do quite a good job). Of course when played correctly magearna will do well and it usually gets to trade 1 for 1 but it’s impact on games can easily be reduced. That to me is a sign of a good Pokémon that makes adaptation necessary but not to the point that there’s no counter play like Cinderace. This is something that’s bugged me for a long time, Smogon needs to understand slow Pokémon are by definition easier to handle. Speed is the most important stat in the game! Slow wallbreakers can often be handled by adapting, let people adapt to them!
I’ve also seen speculation that banning Magearna would allow teams to prepare better against Cinderace (like running physically defensive Toxapex), why the hell does the argument work that way but not the reverse? Banning Cinderace would make faster teams better therefore making Magearna worse...
All in all I just don’t see how this suspect makes sense, Cinderace clearly needs to be banned, and banning Magearna won’t change that. However, whether Magearna will require a ban does depend on how a Cinderace-less metagame looks. As it stands I will vote do not ban, Magearna is not the problem here, and it deserves a proper test once Cinderace is gone.
We’ve experienced Cinderace in both the pre-DLC and post-DLC metas, and he was insane in both. Having laddered and practiced a lot for WCop (and to get these reqs), I’ve always found Cinderace to be more restrictive to teambuilding as well as a stronger presence in every game. There’s basically no way to deal with Cinderace + volt switch cores other than using your own Cinderace + volt switch core. Rocky helmet sort of works but they always get knocked off and other support (spikes, wish) make it unreliable.
In short my experience playing against cinderace is that there’s 3 ways to win against it:
1) Have your own Cinderace
2) Hope for misses
3) Pray that your opponent is an idiot
It reminds me of how bs Genesect was in BW OU, it’s that stupid.
As for magearna, I agree it’s very strong, but its speed make it so you have a fighting chance against it. You can just choose to play a team that’s faster, and/or include one of its counters in your team (toxapex, Scizor, volcarona, Rotom-h all do quite a good job). Of course when played correctly magearna will do well and it usually gets to trade 1 for 1 but it’s impact on games can easily be reduced. That to me is a sign of a good Pokémon that makes adaptation necessary but not to the point that there’s no counter play like Cinderace. This is something that’s bugged me for a long time, Smogon needs to understand slow Pokémon are by definition easier to handle. Speed is the most important stat in the game! Slow wallbreakers can often be handled by adapting, let people adapt to them!
I’ve also seen speculation that banning Magearna would allow teams to prepare better against Cinderace (like running physically defensive Toxapex), why the hell does the argument work that way but not the reverse? Banning Cinderace would make faster teams better therefore making Magearna worse...
All in all I just don’t see how this suspect makes sense, Cinderace clearly needs to be banned, and banning Magearna won’t change that. However, whether Magearna will require a ban does depend on how a Cinderace-less metagame looks. As it stands I will vote do not ban, Magearna is not the problem here, and it deserves a proper test once Cinderace is gone.