Metagame SV Ubers UU Metagame Discussion (Ditto, Lunala, Iron Treads and Terapagos Dropped)

I'm very glad to see UUbers Ubers UU get on Smogon! I'll start off some serious discussion:

I am a stall player. After the last tier shifts, where Giratina, Gliscor, and Dondozo rised, and Baxcalibur dropped, stall became way harder to build, way worse, and far fewer people are using it. It's to the point where I believe that stall is bad to a unhealthy degree, and nobody wants to play it.

In my view, the primary reason for this are the three main physical attackers: Zacian, Baxcalibur, and Palafin. Without tera, there is no pokemon that can reliably beat all 3 of them, which means you either need 1 pokemon to beat each of those or you need to dedicate your tera whenever you fight them, which is really bad as they're all common, and still means you lose if they have multiple of these pokemon.

To add insult to injury, the 3 pokemon you'd use to counter them are generally fairly bad for stall, and you wouldn't use them otherwise. This tier is primarily special attackers, which means that the three physical walls you'd have generally aren't very useful outside of that matchup beyond a few specific pokemon, like physical Arceus forms. This constrains stall teambuilding massively: If you want to be able to keep your tera, which is very important, then 3/6 of your team is locked into otherwise mediocre pokemon.

What do you all think should be done about this? In my view, with the tier shifts just a few days away, I don't think anything should be done until the tiers shift. However, if the tier shift happens and nothing significant changes with this dynamic, I believe that either Zacian or Baxcalibur are banworthy. While they likely aren't banworthy ignoring stall, they both make stall so hard to build that it's essentially extinct beyond me and one other player, and pokemon invalidating an archetype seems like a fair reason to ban them to me.

(I don't think that Palafin-H is banworthy in any situation, unlike the other two, as banning it would destroy rain.)
 
i cant help but feel a little responsible for meming this into existence. i've abused the chat and created an account on the forums just for this. im grateful to smogon for the ladder and this should be a lot of fun. big haha react moment to all of the haha reacts and 'ubers IS UbersBL' I've dealt with.

Please be careful with 'ban's from this tier. It will probably never be perfectly balanced and I assume you knew that in its creation.. I think the more sensible approach for what I expect this tier to be will be instead unbanning ubers by usage mons- like ting-lu and other "broken checks broken" scenarios. Lets just embrace that and see where we end up :)

Going to build a team, excited!
 
i cant help but feel a little responsible for meming this into existence. i've abused the chat and created an account on the forums just for this. im grateful to smogon for the ladder and this should be a lot of fun. big haha react moment to all of the haha reacts and 'ubers IS UbersBL' I've dealt with.

Please be careful with 'ban's from this tier. It will probably never be perfectly balanced and I assume you knew that in its creation.. I think the more sensible approach for what I expect this tier to be will be instead unbanning ubers by usage mons- like ting-lu and other "broken checks broken" scenarios. Lets just embrace that and see where we end up :)

Going to build a team, excited!
Unbanning ubers by usage mons have been considered, but we treat this tier similarly to UU, and UU wouldn't unban an OU mon, so we're (well, the council) avoiding banning ubers by usage mons no matter what.
 
we need a ubers uubl tier now

btw does anyone have a good arceus-poison set
All Arceus are pretty customisable, it really depends on your team.

The typical is 252 HP 252 Speed EVs with Judgement, Calm Mind, Recover and Taunt or some sort of coverage last which Earth Power sounds good to hit Steel-types like Magearna and Dialga. You can even pair Tera Ground with this.

Abusing Arceus-Poison's good defensive typing, you can make it into a powerful setup sweeper with Cosmic Power, Recover, Stored Power and Body Press which makes it so if they don't have a taunter and a phaser and you receive a free turn it can almost be impossible for your opponent to win.

The final set I could probably recommend is just a support one with Will-O-Wisp, Taunt and Recover in which you can put Poison Jab or Judgement first as you wish.
 

viet noa

eating neopronoun pizza at little xe/xyrs
is a Pre-Contributor
im not an uubers player (yet...) but watching this tier skyrocket in popularity, and work its way into becoming a recognized metagame, has got to be one of the most impressive feats in recent smogon community history. awesome seeing so many ppl come together to try something refreshing and new!
 
will probably be more heat than ou at this point ngl

I'm here to see where this goes. A lot of past ideas for a similar concept to this have been, uh, shortsighted to say the least, so the fact that UUbers does so much to address this and create something not only stable, but dynamic and engaging enough to play and develop, is really exciting.
 
Obviously early meta is kinda just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, but some early takes:

- I think the Arceus forms are the coolest part of this meta; you really rely on them for defensive synergy since the meta really lacks good defensive staples otherwise, and while none of the forms the meta actually has are real immediate threats, the raw stats make them incredibly dependable. Yes, it's kind of a GSE Lax situation where the main thing keeping them in check is the fact that you need them to run glue sets in large part because of each other, but I will say that the lack of immediate power on any of the early variants make them feel super manageable. I think right now you more or less need your Arceus to be a Fairy check so that really limits your options, but once that frees up I'm really excited to see how it develops.
- Zacian is stupid and probably needs to go. It's basically just Fireceus and Poisonceus that beat it (and Crocolor ig?) because it outspeeds everything, it's absurdly strong, and it covers essentially everything it needs with Fairy STAB + Tera Ground. This thing was banned from Ubers last gen and you can tell why.
- Mag's in the same boat where I feel like it forces you to use your Arceus to beat it, but unlike Zacian, Mag doesn't break through its difficult Arceus matchups as easily because it gets phazed out. It was disgusting in OU because the things that could take its hits generally got set up on, but there's too much immediate power in this meta for that to work so well. I'll try it out and see.
- Palkia's everywhere, super fast and super strong. It's always stronger than I think it is, but being outsped by Zacian really limits its ability to run through a team. We'll see.
- Weather's something. Sun has Chi-Yu, Rain has Palafin, and Sand has Houndstone, the former two blow through teams and the latter I think forces really linear counterplay approaching the late game. I think there's definitely innovation to be had in the meta to improve on checking these things.

The thing that's really nice about this meta compared to OU is that the power level is incredibly high, but the raw stats on both offense and defense mean that you have a ton of initial power to really punish passivity and a ton of ways to limit any one thing from instantly carving through your entire team. There's some stupid stuff, for sure, but I definitely think there's a distinct meta here.
 
Oh wow! I'm so happy for yall in getting recognized! I've been following yalls developments in the stunfisk subreddit and I'm glad all your effort got recognized!

I'm not ready to dip my feet into the metagame yet but I will certainly check it out! I hope this metagame and tier flourishes and grows for yall ❤!!!
 
Obviously early meta is kinda just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, but some early takes:

- I think the Arceus forms are the coolest part of this meta; you really rely on them for defensive synergy since the meta really lacks good defensive staples otherwise, and while none of the forms the meta actually has are real immediate threats, the raw stats make them incredibly dependable. Yes, it's kind of a GSE Lax situation where the main thing keeping them in check is the fact that you need them to run glue sets in large part because of each other, but I will say that the lack of immediate power on any of the early variants make them feel super manageable. I think right now you more or less need your Arceus to be a Fairy check so that really limits your options, but once that frees up I'm really excited to see how it develops.
- Zacian is stupid and probably needs to go. It's basically just Fireceus and Poisonceus that beat it (and Crocolor ig?) because it outspeeds everything, it's absurdly strong, and it covers essentially everything it needs with Fairy STAB + Tera Ground. This thing was banned from Ubers last gen and you can tell why.
- Mag's in the same boat where I feel like it forces you to use your Arceus to beat it, but unlike Zacian, Mag doesn't break through its difficult Arceus matchups as easily because it gets phazed out. It was disgusting in OU because the things that could take its hits generally got set up on, but there's too much immediate power in this meta for that to work so well. I'll try it out and see.
- Palkia's everywhere, super fast and super strong. It's always stronger than I think it is, but being outsped by Zacian really limits its ability to run through a team. We'll see.
- Weather's something. Sun has Chi-Yu, Rain has Palafin, and Sand has Houndstone, the former two blow through teams and the latter I think forces really linear counterplay approaching the late game. I think there's definitely innovation to be had in the meta to improve on checking these things.

The thing that's really nice about this meta compared to OU is that the power level is incredibly high, but the raw stats on both offense and defense mean that you have a ton of initial power to really punish passivity and a ton of ways to limit any one thing from instantly carving through your entire team. There's some stupid stuff, for sure, but I definitely think there's a distinct meta here.
I agree that the Arceus meta-metagame is really cool.

On the Zacian-Hero point, I think it is easily the strongest and most centralizing presence in the tier. I see the meta (from a team perspective) developing around either being fast and strong enough to take Zach out first (Weather, Scarf Gholdengo, etc.), outlasting it through multiple checks and Tera baits (Balance/Stall), or enabling your own Zach to win first (Shed Tail, Trapping, etc.). We will see how healthy it is as things move forward.
 
rolling in with my one liner: played a little bit, really fun stuff on display here, spent more time picking an arceus form than building the rest of my teams, and nuke zacian and last respects so the meta becomes certified peak
 

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