Suspect SV AAA Suspect #1: Bejeweled (Terastallizing)

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shadowpea

everyone is lonely sometimes
is a Tiering Contributor
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ceruledge is so fun. both bundle and flutter are dumb but i didnt see many specs bundles on my run and half the flutter players are idiots. people need to use hadron shocks more its a beautiful mon.

team by Tanny89k, i replaced flame charge with solarblade on ceruledge and clicked it maybe once. goated mon. valiant felt like a dead slot 70% of the games because bundle and ceruledge were too busy commiting war crimes.

please ban blessing dear god.

edit: leaning towards simply waiting for the ban to be decided by the ppl before me then casting the vote for the majority
 
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I changed my mind, will vote ban. After playing some more I don't think tera can be healthy without some kind of clause. The versatility and power level that AAA provides to its offensive threats makes it impossible to compensate for the unpredictability that tera adds on top of that with intelligent play.
 

RoyalReloaded

n_n
is a Top Tiering Contributor
MPL Champion
Hello, it's me again



This is my 2nd AAA suspect and definitely the more enjoyable one of the two. This was a lot of fun!

I'm a sample team merchant - I used the team provided by Magikarp_Is_AG. It's really strong and just as easy to use.

Personally, I will be voting Do Not Ban. I can understand why people will vote ban, as it makes some pokemon incredibly strong, namely Aerilate Dragonite, but even that is manageable.

However, I would like to call attention to Shed Tail. Shed Tail feels incredibly strong given the customizability, for lack of a better word, that AAA provides. I can attest moreso to the power of Cyclizar as opposed to Orthworm, but it feels seriously oppressive. Being able to send a sub into a broken sweeper is incredibly cheap. Due to the variance of sets that can be used in AAA it feels incredibly overwhelming. I won several games just by Shed Tailing into Dazzling Sash Polteageist, opponent tries to use Extreme Speed Dragonite and just instantly loses because it doesnt work and I get a Shell Smash.

I would strongly support a Shed Tail suspect and I would not be surprised if other people shared this notion.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this and hopefully I can become more involved this generation!


EDIT: after thoroughly reading the thread, I can completely understand why people are voting ban. During my suspect run, I did not encounter any tera situations that were completely and utterly frustrating. Because of this, I am on the DNB side. It does not make sense to me to vote for something that I personally did not encounter and voting for it because, "other people have experienced it". I will be playing more games on my main account and that may or may not influence my vote. I appreciate everyone posting their thoughts here, as well as specific examples to help me make an informed decision!
 
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Lechen

Crimson Flower
is a Tiering Contributor
After reading the other posts and playing some more AAA I changed my mind. Allowing for someone to change their Pokemon's typing instantly makes the meta unpredictable, which is both uncompetitive and unhealthy for the meta. Therefore, I will probably vote ban.
 
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s/os Isaiah for team and letting me cope during reqs. this mech is insanely stupid generally and in OMs where you can stack free adapt on insane offensive abilities it's obviously ludicrous. it'd be quicker to list what mons aren't broken w this mech beyond all the guesswork nonsense
 
The case for Terastalization

I've been holding off on arguing too much for tera so far, because as mechanics go Tera really does have the potential to be broken. Unlike, say, dynamax, Terastalization is not broken beyond belief, but like I said in my post at the start of the thread there was definitely the possibility that people would come up with big brained terastalization strategies that made it an obvious boot. This did not end up happening; in battles, terastalization currently functions about how it did at the start of the suspect, with only a few minor changes to use cases. As such, it falls to me now to make the argument I could have made at the start of the suspect, but with more experience and evidence.

First, to lay some groundwork for my case. I think our vote here should take terastalization in its context as a mechanic. Namely, we should be offering a higher standard of scrutiny for tiering action on it than we would for a pokemon, especially this early in the gen under these circumstances. If terastalization is just a little broken, or arguably broken, or definitely broken on a few abusers that are plausibly banworthy anyway, we ought to vote do not ban. This is especially true given the context of the suspect itself, in which it was banned and then suspected for unbanned prior to its use in any tours - and where the only ongoing tour therefore has it banned in its entirety. If, say, 55% of the playerbase comes down narrowly on the side of banning and it gets the boot, that would be a mistake in our teiring process, since under normal circumstances that wouldn't even have gotten it banned in the first place. On the flip side, however, a no ban here should not end the discussion. If terastalization does not end up getting the boot here and now, that should not preclude it coming up again in a few months once some abusers are banned and tournament games played with it. I don't think it would even neccesarily be a bad idea to test it a third time should that fail, presuming the DNB is not totally onesided, although that should wait until after the metagame stablizes should it come to pass. This decision is not - and should not - be an up/down "do I want to play the rest of the generation with terastalization." Instead, it should be "do I, at the current moment, know enough to be sure I want it gone for good."

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Alright, setup done. Broadly speaking, I think there are 3 main ways to play terastalization. Some people have already gone into different variety of users, on stab powerup vs offstab coverage, etc but I think this is a distraction from how it works out in practiceand the overlap is unclear. Instead of focusing on the pokemon in question, I tend to divide it by team strategies, into three broad strategies. Namely, proactive, active, reactive.

Proactive terastalization takes place early in the game, usually as soon as it can be arranged. You take the pokemon you want to terastalize, get it in safely, and terastalize it pretty much instantly. Overall, this tends to be the strongest form of terastalization, and comprises strategies like tera water iron bundle to nuke the shit out of things, tera fairy/flying nacl to sit on things, tera fairy avalugg for your fighting resist, etcetera. By doing this, you get the most mileage out of your terastalization and are able to use it throughout the battle, making use of the altered typing or adaptability not just at one key turn but again and again. When your Avalugg hards in on their Great Tusk every time they get it in and shuts them down, there's no question of you getting your money's worth on terastalization. However, for all its power I think this use of terastalization is near uniformly not broken. You could make an argument for a particular user like Iron Bundle or Flutter Mane, but it's predictable, both ahead of time what pokemon runs what and during the battle once it gets revealed, such that it encourages skillfull gameplay and creative building.

Active terastalization can take plavce at any point in the game, but usually into the midgame. Active terastalization is all about positioning, and rather than get the most usage out of tera in general, seeks to get the most value out of one specific turn. In this case, you make use of setup sweepers, hazards, pivoting, chip damage, etcetera to get one pokemon in the position to win, then (ideally) terastalize and do so. This is the remit of strategies like tera steel iron hands terastalizing in front of a dragonite to sweep by unimpeded, or having rock spikes GaG chomp + tera dark kingambit and playing until you can tera dark and kill their 40% great tusk with +2 sucker punch, or tera flying dragonite to pick off some threat or kill their switchin should the flying resist be frail or chipped enough. This is, I think, the most broken form of terastalization and the one people tend to complain about, but I think this analysis misses nuance. For one thing, getting into these positions is a skill of its own, especially to do so without use of your tera. It also requires careful play and prediction in the tera itself - tera too early, and you will blow it without winning, while tera too late and your best abuser might die before you get a shot. Even in the right turn, these are often further vulnerable to prediction by your opponent, and the difficulty here is underestimated. A given turn is the correct opportunity to terastalize or not for a reasonand if you are paying attention those reasonsa re usally just as legible to you as they are to the opponent using them, especially if you use process of elimination and teambuilding analysis to figure out what tera type they are. However, I don't think complaining about this is unreasonable; while there is skill here, it is somewhat more compressed skill, and this is particularly true given what pokemon are currently legal. The likes of Kingambit, Flutter Mane, and Dragonite, skew the risk vs reward in the favor of their player; as pokemon they are frankly too strong as is, and as such a well timed terastalization has a much easier time pushing them over the edge. When it's hard to fit one flutter mane check at the best of times, it's much easier to lose your ice scales Corviknight to two tera electric thunderbolts in a row after you found yourself caught out of position with rocks up. Good as Gold is also a major contributing factor to this brokeness, since it makes keeping up hazards essentially trivial for the right kind of offensive team and thus making tera more decisive.

The third kind of terastalization is reactive tera, where you terastalize to stop an enemy sweep. This is stuff like using tera ground ice spinner great tusk to live a +1 dragonite espeed and kill back, or tera dragon PH dondozo to shut down a Volcarona sweep. This, I think, fills two major roles. One, it contributes to keeping the second form of tera under control, wherein smart teambuilding can allow you to - with the help of the right tera types - shut down their would-be victory before it gets going. The second, it generically ends winning positions. Of these two, the second is the primary cause for complaint I see, and for good reason - while broken checks broken is not a goal of our philosophy, the fact that terastalization as a mechanic can prevent the worst of its abuses decreases its negative impact on the metagame as a whole, which naturally tends to make this seen as fine. Criticism of this second part is not unwarrented, but I think degree is significantly overstated. Like it or not, AAA has no shortage of options you can pick to customize a pokemon such that they shut down what seems like a winning line, from running an immunity ability to focus sash to putting fur coat / ice scales on an offensive pokemon to strengthening priority. There is any difference in degree between a Dragapult using tera Steel to live an Aerilate Extreme Speed from Dragonite and simply running a Dazzling Dragapult, but there's not a difference in kind. Both come at an opportunity cost - not being able to use the first two categories of tera and taking an ability slot, respectively - both can be extremely customizable and used for offensive opportunities, not unlike how one can destroy Tapu Fini as a Kommo-o counter with Galvanize Boomburst, and both are things you work into a team at builder to maximize your advantage.

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On the whole, I think Terastalization definitely includes some very healthy and enjoyable dynamics, such that there will be notable collateral damage from hitting it. I think terasalization deserves a higher degree of scrutiny and threshold for action. I think terastalization is underexplored, with no tour use and relatively little ladder use due to timing, especially given how much of the ladder is not really a serious exploration of it. I think that all forms of terastalization require skill both in battle and in builder, although not identical amounts, and that how much you get out of them relates directly to what you put in. I think terastalization, while not blatantly obvious, is much less unpredictable than people believe should they put in real effort on the subject, and that complaints along these lines are solvable with tiering measures other than a ban. And I think that a significant portion of this appearance of brokenness comes not from tera itself but from wildly unabalanced pokemon running around that can then abuse it with impunity to go from broken to incredibly broken, which artificially inflates its threat. Taken together, I think I will still be voting DO NOT BAN.
 
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