Uhg no. Do I have to bring up all the posts I made in the last Sand Viel discussion thread? Because I pretty much proved there that "WE DON'T LIKE HAX WAAAAAAH" was not an excuse to ban something.
I do not think that banning Sand Viel JUST to bring back Garchomp is right either. It sets an unsettling precedent of banning aspects of Pokemon instead of the whole Pokemon in order to keep it OU. That's not the way ban lists should work, not if we want to keep them simple and accessable. And don't make the argument that this is different because Sand Veil is being banned independently; that's bullshit, the ban's only being extended to others as an excuse.
And by god if I haven't explained enough why banning Sand Viel goes against everything Smogon has stood for the past 10 or so years I don't know what will convince people. Seriously, think about it for a second. When was the last time you've lost a game to Sand Viel? Probably back in the Garchomp era for a lot of us, and for the rest of us maybe once or twice from Gliscor. You know, a lot of Pokemon use hax based strategies, ones that area lot more effective. I don't see why we should treat Gliscor or Garchomp as any different. Why don't we just ban Serene Grace then? Or Confuse Ray? Seriously people. Hax is a part of Pokemon and you need to learn to deal with it instead of trying to cut it out like a cancer.
Bottom line is that Sand viel should NOT be banned for the purpose of brining Garchomp down. If Garchomp is broken with Sand Viel, it's broken as a whole Pokemon like Blaziken, Excadrill and Thundurus-I. Whether or not it is broken or not with Rough Skin should be utterly irrelevant unless we decide INDEPENDENTLY that Sand Veil is broken (and for the love of god it's clear that it is not. Annoying? Yes, of course. Broken? No!). IF hypothetically that were the case, then sure, retesting Garchomp would be cool. I honestly doubt that it's broken in the current metagame without it (and maybe even with it). But these tests should be SEPARATE, not rolled into one.
I mean, what are we going to decide from this? That if Garchomp is not broken without Sand Veil, that Sand Veil gets banned so Garchomp can come down? That seems ridiculously unfair to Sand Veil. The other way around, if we decide we don't want to ban Sand Veil, then Garchomp stays in Ubers because we don't know if it's still broken or not WITH the ability. That's not fair to Garchomp! It makes no damn sense!
What we SHOULD be doing is deciding once and for all on Sand Veil FIRST, THEN test Garchomp. The results are just getting muddled with this. In short; this is a terrible idea and just seems to be a way to pander to the community (and likely to the ideals of some of the council members) as much as possible as quickly as possible rather than to actually discover what is broken and what is not. And I really, really disapprove of that.
EDIT:
In case it isn't clear enough, my problems are these:
1) Testing both Sand Veil and Garchomp together does not give viable results as to either one and is unfair to what ends up Uber no matter what way the testing turns out.
2) Sand Veil isn't remotely broken. Double Team, minimize and evasion items should be the extent of the evasion clause only. Why? Because of their distribution, they can potentially affect the whole game and make it more luck base to an undesirable extent. The abilities however are distributed to an EXTREMELY small number of Pokemon and have very small effect on the metagame as a whole. If one Pokemon with an evasion ability is causing a lot of problems the Pokemon as a whole should be banned because it is the Pokemon that is broken, not the ability.