Ubers Unleashed - OU with a Twist

[ryan]

Ubers Unleased
OU with minimal bans
originally approved by Arcticblast, then approved again by Joim when the concept changed
​

With BW2 coming to a close and XY on its way in the door, many people have wondered what the best approach to XY suspect testing in its early stages should look like. Many have considered whether all Pokemon should be unbanned. Others have suggested we start with a minimal banlist of only the legendary Pokemon with a BST of 670 or greater. Regardless of how we end up handling things, a metagame with the underused Ubers dropping down to OU is undoubtedly interesting. We got a short taste of something of this sort at the beginning of BW1, when offensive behemoths such as Darkrai and Shaymin were legal, but what would this metagame look like now?

The purpose of this metagame is to see how current Ubers outside of those with a BST of 670 and above will fare when they are allowed to reign free once again (note that "current Ubers with a BST of 670 and above" does not include Slaking and Regigigas for obvious reasons). I've heard plenty of people complain on IRC that BW has been a ban-happy generation. Although I don't entirely agree with this, those people can try things out for themselves and judge for themselves whether BW has been too ban-happy or if the power creep is quite simply too much. Newer players can also try out the things that they never got the opportunity to use before they were banned! Most importantly, we all like to play with broken shit whether we want to admit it or not. With this metagame, we can do just that.

I've listed both the Pokemon that have been unbanned and the Pokemon that will be banned below.

Ubers that have been unbanned

Joim sucks

Blaziken
Darkrai
Deoxys
Deoxys-Attack
Deoxys-Defense
Deoxys-Speed
Excadrill
Genesect
Landorus-Incarnate
Manaphy
Shaymin-Sky
Thundurus-Incarnate
Tornadus-Therian

OU Pokemon that will be banned
Kyurem-Black

On top of the above ban and releases, all regular standard OU clauses will be enforced in this metagame. Drizzle + Swift Swim is a huge can of worms on top of all of the other broken Pokemon, so it will not be unbanned. Moody was also recently retested in Ubers, and considering that the clause still stands there, it will still stand here as well. Additionally, the following clauses will be enforced. If I'm forgetting any other clauses, let me know.

Evasion Abilities Clause: Evasion abilities are banned
Sleep Clause Mod: Limit one foe put to sleep
Species Clause: Limit one of each Pokemon
OHKO Clause: OHKO moves are banned
Moody Clause: Moody is banned
Evasion Moves Clause: Evasion moves are banned

Should the playerbase come to the conclusion that certain Pokemon are still broken, even with all of the other previous Ubers allowed, I will test them. I will be fairly strict on testing things, however, as this metagame is intended to be as a very free and open one. I've already had people express concerns about Shaymin, and it's not exactly hard to see why. But before we get too carried away, I encourage people to try things out and judge them with experience rather than just banning based on theorymon.

In order to play this metagame, for now I encourage you to challenge each other on PS! using the regular Ubers format and applying the bans yourself. Because nothing is mechanically different, it shouldn't be too hard to play.

And there you have it! Feel free to discuss potential threats in this new metagame! Which Ubers Pokemon are going to shine? Are they all going to be great Pokemon, or are some of them going to be inferior now (especially considering some of these Pokemon were banned before BW2 was released)? Will formerly underlooked Pokemon from OU and below rise to stardom with the introduction of major threats and loss of others? Will all of the potentially broken threats be able to balance each other out, or will a few overpowered threats reign supreme? Let's find out!

 

[youngjake93]

Why ban Kyurem B? That is silly, I thought the whole point was a less strict bans meta, not irrelevant unnecessary bans.

Edit: Guess what Slaking and Regigigas have as BSTs....? They weren't banned "for obvious reasons", so the BST thing is pretty arbitrary.

 

[SpartanMalice]

It's not unnecessary. He did say mons with a BST of 670 or greater are banned, and guess what Kyurem-B's base stat total is ?

 

[Spinda]

If we could just not include the unban list, but still include the banlist, I'd play this over current OU anytime
On a more serious note, I'm pretty interested, and despite most unbans being offensively inclined, I'll try making a stall team. Deoxys-A and Blaziken seem like the biggest problems to stall. ( Jesus christ it's impossible to find a good MixBlaziken check :( )


Specially Defensive Bronzong seems quite good in this metagame, being a good check to offensive Deoxys forms, Skymin, Landorus-I, Tornadus-T and ( non mold breaker ) Excadrill.. Unfortunately it's quite easily overwhelmed so it would need wish support :/

 

[Prosecutor Godot]

This is interesting since my memories of playing OU with some of the banned pokemon are vague.

I think the Kyurem-B ban makes sense. While I personally don't think that it's broken, it's base stat is still over the limit that's put in place here.

 

[Halliday]

This exists on joimslab. It's called ou-lenient there.

 

[Audiosurfer]

Ok, there was a little 8 person tourney w/ this metagame over at #othermetas which was really fun. Not gonna comment too much on strategies and stuff but I just wanted to say that I really enjoy lists like this, since I prefer a minimalistic banlist to one where threats are banned regularly, so if OU was like this in Gen 6 I'd be pretty happy :) Also it reminds me of Dream World's banlist alot which is cool because that banlist was pretty awesome. To answer one of the questions posed in the OP, I do think that the threats can balance themselves out. As long as you're sure to have plans for them when teambuilding, I don't think you'll find yourself outright losing to anything consistently or having to bend over backwards to check them or anything. It's easier to exploit poor teambuilding due to the higher power of mons now I guess, but I don't think that that's much of a concern, and when I played in the tournament I didn't feel as if I had to go too far to check things I needed to, and I didn't feel overly threatened by any of the unbanned mons (although my team had a pretty bad Blaziken weakness so thankfully I didn't run into that :) ). Obviously was a small tournament so I can't say how it'll end up later, but from my limited experience it seems fine to me, and can open up for a lot of versatility.

 

[ryan]

Yeah, the tourney was a whole lot of fun. My favorite part of it was Gliscor. :) SD Gliscor is a really good offensive check to sand offense teams, which, as you can imagine, are pretty potent with the unban of Excadrill. Another thing that I noticed while playing was that standard specially defensive Tyranitar is really not that great. It's just really difficult to find the opportunity to set up Stealth Rock with it, and with Tornadus-T and Genesect, two potent users of U-turn, unbanned, it can be really detrimental to your team to have Tyranitar out. I might try out specially defensive Hippowdon though! Who knows?

Also, I beat Joim's team of 5 Ubers and a Tyranitar with a team of 5 OU Pokemon and a Skymin. :}

Edit: Guess what Slaking and Regigigas have as BSTs....? They weren't banned "for obvious reasons", so the BST thing is pretty arbitrary.

The obvious reason is:

The purpose of this metagame is to see how current Ubers outside of those with a BST of 670 and above will fare when they are allowed to reign free once again

Which Slaking and Regigigas are, you guessed it: not Ubers. If you guys seriously want to use Kyurem-Black, I don't really care that much. The point of banning it was to make decisions that weren't arbitrary at all. It fit the bill for the things I was keeping banned, so it seemed logical to lump it in.

 

[canno]

I would like to say that this looks incredibly fun. Deo-D will see no use, since it's main role has been taken by Deo-S and to an extent Deo-A. Speaking of the two, I wonder which one will get more use (Deo-S outspeed everything while Deo-A actually has offensive presence, but dies to everything).

Honestly, everything looks like it got new things to play with that might balance each other out (Sun gets GeneTrio and Blaziken; Rain gets Thundurus-I, Manaphy, and Genetrio for the now OU Torn-T; Sand gets Excadrill and to a lesser extent Landorous-I' HO gets to spike stack with the best of the best Deo-S/A. The rest seem more weather neutral than the others). This actually reminds me a lot of DW OU back when it was a thing, where we unbanned a lot of things and they turned out to be not broken. Wonder if the banlist will be similar to that one.

 

[Monte Cristo]

Now personally, I really think BLazike and Excadrill will be underrated sweepers in thsi meta, mainly because one (ken) is boosting reliant while the other is weather reliant, while these factors do not stop them from being effective, these factors do drag them down, I can see priority being everywhere in this meta for things like weakend blaziken, excadrill deoA and more threats, breloom will now be the priority user of choice imo since it can hit more things with mach punch than scizor's bullet punch can hit. more thoughts to come later

Also the minotour was awesome, eventhough I lost in round one to qwilphish, it was still exciting and fun

 

[Arcticblast]

The Kyurem-B discussion is not conducive to a healthy discussion. Any further discussion on Kyurem-B's ban will lead to posts being deleted and posters being warned. All Kyurem-B discussion after Treecko's initial response has been deleted.

Personally, I think Blaziken and Gothitelle could be a very effective pair on Sun teams - Gothitelle can trap and dish out some hefty damage to Blaziken's counters and a few of its (non-Excadrill) checks, letting Blaziken shred through the opposition. Especially with Genesect support...

 

[Stone RG]

So the meta is played manually on PS? Damn i wouldve liked it to have its own separate tier but whatevs i guess, this is just what i was looking for after getting bored of OU, and, since keld is staying, there is no more suspects, :]