BW OU Dugtrio Vote [BANNED] - reopened

[steelskitty]

i ran out of time to respond to this before the thread closed for the first time, but i want to address it now because i still have concerns about it.

On voter pool:

First of all, the intent behind these votes has always been to cater to those playing the tier in an official Smogon capacity.

i'm unsure as to what you mean by "playing the tier in an official smogon capacity." do i not play "the tier in an official Smogon capacity" when i play roa tours? what about oupl, or any other tour that doesn't bear a trophy? smogon endorses their existence and they're hosted on the site — they seem to be officially on smogon to me. you could say "those playing the tier in an official Smogon capacity" are people playing in trophy-bearing tours, but then what made the pre-2014 bw ou ladder fall under the same definition of "official?" smogon has plenty of tours featuring bw ou that don't yield trophies. what makes doing well in one of those any less valid for getting reqs than scoring 15 points in smogon tour or going positive over 3 spl games? that is, assuming your primary criteria for who gets to vote is activity, like you allude to later in your post.

When BW was the current gen, this included both the ladder and official tournaments; in the absence of an active ladder, it's now only tournaments.

also consider that giving players the opportunity to earn reqs through either suspect ladders or tours wasn't a bad system. it helped ensure that tier changes reflected the desires of a larger portion of the player base. it gave people more chances to qualify for reqs. it gave people who couldn't play official tours a chance. when the ladder stopped being active, why did the people in charge of old gens tiering see no need to replace it with a different way to help more bw players earn reqs? i understand that a bw circuit is ostensibly in the works, but i still don't think that'll be enough even if/when it does someday exist.

The decision to limit qualifications to the most recent two tournament phases was motivated by the constant fluctuation of the metagame. The SPL metagame now is much different than from last year; I guarantee you that many players got away without considering Dugtrio in their teambuilding.

"constant fluctuation of the metagame?" i feel like you're really exaggerating how much bw ou has changed in the last year, or even the last four. sand swapped around some of its filler slots but stayed largely the same. dragmag that existed almost half a decade ago still sees use in similar or identical forms. rain offense and balance have enjoyed the same general framework for years, too. if anything, the most notable metagame shifts result from the bw ou council's recurrent desire to tool with the tier. obviously sand started needing excadrill checks, rain started running excadrill, and sun underwent drastic structural changes as a result of the chlorophyll ban. did any of these shifts create a "constant fluctuation of the metagame," though? i don't think so. a player doesn't need to have been active during last spl or smogon tour to have a solid understanding of the way bw ou works.

the claim about people getting away with not considering dugtrio in their building also is absurd. that pokemon has been standard on sun since before i started playing the tier in spring of 2013. it's not like a player with a good record in, say, last wcop, classic, or even smogon tour 22 would have no idea what effect dugtrio has on the tier. i don't even think players from 2017 are old enough to be considered "legacy players," too. 2017 was only four and a half months ago. just because dugtrio rose in usage for a few months and people started spamming it with cresselia doesn't mean a player who did well in 2017 would have no idea of the ramifications of dugtrio's continued presence in bw ou. if you didn't prep for it in 2017, or 2016, or 2015, etc...you were still going to lose to it and whatever sun abuser it was paired with just the same. the council could've reached back further and considered a broader pool of eligible voters even if it only wanted to restrict this to strong players in trophy-bearing tours.

In any case, subjectively judging criteria is something we deliberately sought to reduce by adopting this system.

this part particularly bothers me, because this is one of the most subjective systems for voting requirements i have ever seen. what made the criteria for who was eligible to vote even remotely objective? what about the threshold for a majority you used? how about the decision to post this thread without a discussion thread on the explicit possibility of a dugtrio ban first? does your argument against pre-suspect threads have anything but claims of value? you describe the concept of the pre-suspect discussion thread as

unstructured, overly subjective, and excessively influenced by posting attrition and policy theater. It wasn't actually a democratic process, only the false pretense of one, and I'm not sorry to see it go.

but this is nothing more than a series of opinions ("overly" subjective, "excessively" influenced, "policy theater," etc). i understand that making suspect tests entirely objective isn't possible. however, this test could've gone to much greater lengths to at least approach objectivity.

Regarding tournament selection: right now, we draw from a mix of exclusive, selection-based tournaments (WCoP and SPL) and general non-selection tournaments (Tour x2, Classic), with at least one of each per phase, meaning that people who opt to manage or play different tiers in SPL/WCoP can still participate through general entry in Tour.

here's another problem with the quality of voting criteria. a lot of people cannot reasonably accrue 15 points in smogon tour, and that says nothing holistically about their active engagement with the tier and capacity to cast an educated vote. in my case, i almost always have weekend plans, and i shouldn't have to choose between real life priorities and smogon tour if i want to qualify for reqs. there's also the players around the world who live in timezones that make it too inconvenient for them to play smogon tour.

lastly,

On forewarning and qualification opportunities:

No old generation suspect test has ever notified its playerbase in advance of the requirements for voting. In every case, the suspect was decided, and the voters drawn from past BW tournaments. This was the case when we voted on Excadrill a few months ago; the only thing that has changed is the period from which we are drawing voters.

a bit later in this paragraph you call the use of spl and smogon tour as opportunities to qualify for reqs "well-precedented." it isn't. the only precedent for retroactively voting on any pokemon in this tier was the excadrill fiasco. before finch announced on december 1st that a bw ou council would be formed, two and a half years after bw ou's last tier change, i kind of assumed bw, like other old gens, was more or less done significantly altering its metagame. there was no clear indicator that season 23 of smogon tour would later be used to determine voter eligibility for a suspect vote (particularly on dugtrio), because there was no indication that there would be another suspect vote. that's another reason why it wasn't fair to shorten some of the list of possible voters to those who played in smogon tour.

Assuming we stick with this system, this is actually the only vote that won't have its methods of qualification published well in advance; it is now explicitly clear that performance in any official BW tournament will earn the right to participation in an exit survey and potential vote in the suspect period immediately following, and a vote in the suspect period following that.

however, i think the transparency publishing the methods of qualification in advance could create would be a good thing. i do wonder, though — is there a valid reason to restrict exit surveys to only people who qualify to vote through tour performance? why not automatically include those people, but also grant everyone else the ability to sign up to receive them also?

assuming that:
1) pre-suspect discussion threads create a toxic environment, fostering "a false pretense of [democracy]" and determining argument winners via "posting attrition"
2) pre-suspect discussion is sought after, because the bw ou council cares about the opinions of bw ou players when proposing tiering decisions
3) the bw ou council has a responsibility to include more of the player base in its tiering decisions,

it makes sense to give players the discretion to sign up for a private venue to voice their opinion. there shouldn't be concerns about activity with this — after all, a player would need a fair level of engagement already to voluntarily sign up for something like this.

 

[Eo Ut Mortus]

We intend to follow up with more concrete responses later, so if a point wasn't addressed, rest assured it has been acknowledged and is being discussed. These are just my thoughts right now (in response to steel's post).

For the record, my criticism was not directed at the existence of pre-suspect threads, but rather at the absence of an official way to determine suspects from those threads other than waiting around for someone from SS to decide whose essay had the most impact/likes and base a vote on that. See the Excadrill vote as an example: no clear timeline or process whatsoever. The council did not intend to get rid of suspect threads or discussion in general, but we failed to clearly communicate our intentions behind the thread and compressed our timeline to the point where there was not enough time for discussion. We're on the same page here, I think. When you argue that venues for discussion should be made available in anticipation of suspects and votes, I agree, and expanding the scope of the exit survey is an easy first step.

Voter exclusivity is a bit more nuanced of an issue. I agree it would be advantageous if we could set up more avenues for voting, and live suspect tours are an idea I've personally floated. Having said that, I'm not going to promise we'll achieve the same degree of open qualification as we did during the BW ladder. We weren't selected to create entire infrastructure out of nothing, so in most cases, we're going to work with what we already have, but relaxing those requirements, particularly the timeframe, is still an option. Also, while my opinion is not necessarily universal across the council (so don't take this as any final decision), I am personally against special applications. I believe if we accept a special applicant, we must be able to articulate why we accepted them, and if we find ourselves articulating it consistently, we can probably make that a standard method of qualification in the first place. If special applications radically alter voting pools from test to test, it's clear they've become less special and more standard. So here's my question to you and anyone else who'd like to answer: Outside of the tournaments we're already using and the tournaments we hope to use, exactly what concrete requirements do you think are adequate for determining voter qualification for these tests?

As for the timeframe, we might have to fundamentally disagree with the bottom line here, because I do believe the metagame changes enough to warrant placing a time gate on qualification. That being said, yes, relaxing the timeframe is an option. I don't think we got it correct this time, but I don't think it was fully unreasonable, either. I'd personally push to add a couple more months to encompass at least three tournaments. Probably not over a year, though, and I say this as someone who would've qualified based on my last year's SPL performance. I've been both an active and an inactive BW player at various times, and I am happy to yield my vote whenever I am inactive if it means that people who haven't played the tier in over a year don't get to dictate how I play the game whenever I am an active player. Proven newer and active players should have the largest say, because they're currently contributing the most to the tournaments and the metagame we're playing, and we want to encourage that.

 

[M Dragon]

Dugtrio is not a new thing that started 6 months ago. Dugtrio has been relevant in BW for a long time, and it has been a key part in different "OP" strats in the past, such as Genesect meta (u-turn to trap its #1 counter: Heatran), Torn-T Rain (Dug removes TTar, which is great for both rain and torn-t) or Sun Offense (Dugtrio removing both TTar and Heatran, so a powerful Chloro sweeper such as Venusaur). And this still happens now with the modern Sun stall or with Dug rain offense. Note that I am not saying that mons like Gene or Torn-T were broken because of Dug's support, although it was definitely a very big factor in their bans. Venusaur (and the other Chloro users) on the other hand was far from broken or OP, and those teams were only "broken" because Dug ability to remove TTar and weakened Politoed, allowing Sun to win the weather war and start Venusaur's reign of terror.

The decision to suspect Dugtrio was not because council is biased or because we hate Dugtrio.
In the last 6 months, I have noticed the rise of similar Dug based teams, this time with different abusers (Cress + sun, Volca + sun, Torn + rain, etc), so we were in a similar situation than Venusaur's meta, but with less scary abusers (at least we didnt have something with +2 speed and a move equivalent to SD and NP at the same time). So maybe we got the ban wrong then, and we should have banned Dug instead of Chloro.
The poll we made after SPL, where we asked players about their opinion in current BW, just confirmed that many BWers also thought in a similar way than me.

I understand some concerns about how the voting was done (few tournaments included, little discussion time, etc), but Dugtrio deserved to be suspected, and the people that have been more active in BW recently should be the ones to vote on it, because they have the most experience in this metagame. I think that 6 months is more than enough time to suspect and ban something we think is uncompetitive and/or bad for the game.

I also agree that it would be a good idea having a second voting in 6 months or so (after classic, wcop, etc)

 

[ABR]

Dugtrio's ban has helped BW OU so far but there appears to be some unfinished business here. Some people preferred the ban to be on Arena Trap / Shadow Tag as a whole but the BW Council opted to simply test Dugtrio itself, on the premise that it was the only problematic pokemon up until the vote. This decision was not only incorrect regarding policy but now it is actively having negative effects on the metagame. I'd like the BW Council to rectify this by changing the ban on Dugtrio to one on both Arena Trap and Shadow Tag.

The main reason to ban the aforementioned trapping abilities is not due to some Dug = Arena Trap automatic type of logic, but because Diglett and Gothitelle are active problems in the metagame. Diglett still achieves the main objective of trapping Tyranitar, but additionally is still capable of trapping pokemon like Heatran, Excadrill, and even Terrakion. Gothitelle may be trapped by the omnipresent Tyranitar but it is almost always able to do its job before that situation occurs, and said job usually involves using Psychic / HP Ice to take down offensive pokemon or tricking a scarf vs more defensive ones. Even if these pokemon aren't as unhealthy as Dugtrio their presence is still an overall negative one and removing said presence can only bring good things.

Furthermore, if we want to talk about consistency and precedent, both SM OU and ORAS OU have banned said trapping abilities altogether. When only Gothitelle saw use, Shadow Tag was banned. When only Dugtrio saw use, Arena Trap was banned. There is no reason why BW OU should be any different. The specific policy for this topic can be found below.

Policy

2.) One important thing to note with this is that distribution both matters (in the case of large distributions) and doesn't matter (in the case of low distributions).
a.) If Stealth Rock or Scald weren't so common, they probably would not be as controversial issues as they are.
b.) However, just because something isn't highly distributed, like Shadow Tag, doesn't mean it isn't unhealthy. Some tried to state that Shadow Tag wouldn't be broken on a 10/10/10/10/10/10 BST mon, but this is the wrong way to look at it.
c.) Things aren't broken (or unhealthy or uncompetitive) only in vacuums; they can contribute to the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Instead, consider how potentially broken elements would be with average distribution on average BST Pokemon. If Shadow Tag was on, let's say 4-5 OU potential Pokemon as opposed to 1-2 and the average BSTs were something like 80/80/80/80/80/80, would it be broken?The take away from this is to not ignore distribution, but if lowly distributed, to assume how the element would take away from team building or battling skill if it was distributed to average pokemon in an average quantity.(Yes, we will provide average statistics)

Diglett and Gothitelle are problems. Even if you don't fully see them as individual pokemon warranting bans by their presence alone akin to Dugtrio, what do we lose by simply extending the Dugtrio ban to one that includes these pokemon as well? If they are issues, even if to a smaller than usual degree for broken pokemon, we have a chance to improve the metagame. We should always rid the meta of unhealthy presences when we can and we can here in a very logical way. Considering the SM and ORAS bans, as well as the fact that non Dugtrio trappers are still seeing usage, we have a golden opportunity to ban Arena Trap and Shadow Tag from BW OU.

 

[Wizard]

No no no this doesn't make any sense whatsover magnet pull has been way more relevant than shadow tag during the course of bw, I don't see any differences between occasionally autolosing to dragons after losing your steel and occasionally autolosing to e.g. keldloom after losing amoonguss...?

Only broken things should be banned, I don't see where this '''unhealthy''' rhetoric comes from but I refuse to believe such a thing should be applied to bw. As a criterion it's inconsistent as hell if we were to apply it we should also ban volcarona and many other things because they are subjectively "unhealthy". Heck one could even go as far as banning everything bar the 50 top pokemons because things as Curse Quagsire solo their flashy offense squad.
Also don't forget that the UNHEALTHY gothitelle arguably has many positive traits that we'd miss if she were to leave. Gothitelle helps limiting as you said chomp / lando, keldeo and terrakion, it's one of the many factors that make Regenerator mons not broken this gen, its sole presence makes you
think twice before bringing stall, and at the same time it may come in handy against stallbreakers themselves. Don't to mention it's one of the few ways to deal with Reuniclus. Please provide problematic replays, can't find anything notable from yesterday's st due to hiddenroom.

Finally, the council hasn't been able to predict that Diglett would have risen so soon, let alone foretelling if these bans will actually be beneficial in the long run!
#stoptouchingbw, if it ain't broke don't fix it

 

[aurora]

I can only assume "changing the ban" to encompass Arena Trap and Shadow Tag means altering what the vote encompasses without holding another one. However, simply changing the result of the vote to encompass both Arena Trap and Shadow Tag would not make sense. That would be like holding a vote to ban one brand of lemonade from being sold in shops, then the people organising the vote deciding that all lemonade is problematic and thus changing the vote themselves to ban all brands of lemonade. People voted to ban or keep Dugtrio only from BW OU. Nobody voted to ban or keep the entirety of Arena Trap and Shadow Tag. I do not think it matters if the original vote was incorrect policy; even if it was, banning both of these trapping abilities is not the same kettle of fish as banning one Pokemon with Arena Trap. There may well be voters in the pool who disagree with banning the abilities in their entirety, which is why a second vote should be held if it is indeed decided that the scope of the vote should change.

 

[steelskitty]

i don't mind banning diglett but i strongly oppose banning shadow tag.

Dugtrio's ban has helped BW OU so far but there appears to be some unfinished business here. Some people preferred the ban to be on Arena Trap / Shadow Tag as a whole but the BW Council opted to simply test Dugtrio itself, on the premise that it was the only problematic pokemon up until the vote. This decision was not only incorrect regarding policy but now it is actively having negative effects on the metagame.

perhaps you have a case regarding diglett. after all, a number of people have used it in smogon tour and other matches since dugtrio's ban. you can probably pull up recent replays and make the case that, over the past week or two, diglett has been pernicious to bw ou. it functions exactly the same way as dugtrio — it traps heatran, tyranitar, excadrill, and other ground-weak pokemon, taking them out of the game and, under the same logic most probably used to justify the dugtrio ban, gives its user an uncompetitive edge. as the little cup version of a pokemon with already horrendous bsts, nobody can argue that it's a good pokemon; rather, it has just the right speed tier, STAB move, and ability to trap a few key pokemon that check a lot of pokemon, and that makes it broken.

can you prove to me beyond the point of theory, though, that gothitelle and wobbuffett "have... negative effects on the metagame?" i challenge you to show me a body of quantitative evidence of either pokemon harming the tier. i don't think you can; neither has enough usage to even warrant a vote, i think, and even if they did, the comparison you make between dugtrio and gothitelle/wobbuffett is a serious faulty analogy.

i want to start with gothitelle. it is simply worse than dugtrio.

let's think first about the speed difference. at almost half the speed of dugtrio, gothitelle is restricted to running a choice scarf to threaten any offensive threats. this already differentiates it from dugtrio, which can run focus sash (or ground gem, or choice band, as some have demonstrated) and have access to all its moves and threaten any grounded thing it damn well pleases. if it doesn't run a choice scarf, it is left with average 70/95/110 defenses to contend against a tier rife with specs latios, offensive heatran, life orb excadrill, and more. if it doesn't run a choice scarf, it doesn't really check anything. it is relegated to trapping some slow defensive threats with pp stall or the inconsistent choice specs set. as a slow trapper, it's similar to magnezone — at the expense of losing the hazard war, it might occasionally take out a ferrothorn, skarmory, or some variants of jirachi. obviously it has a few more targets (amoonguss is a big one), but i don't think anyone wants to argue that magnezone breaks the tier.

the fact that gothitelle must run choice scarf to extend its utility beyond that of magnezone creates another problem: 4mss. theoretically it is a surefire check to a fair bit of the tier, but only theoretically. gothitelle will have just as many games where it does absolutely nothing as it will games where it removes a key threat, because it can't fit all the coverage it needs to. this unreliability contrasts sharply with dugtrio's dependability — it has a STAB move with no opportunity cost to use. it also gets stealth rock, memento, and rock tomb, all valuable moves that give it utility even in games where it can't trap anything. when it does trap things, though, one knows it always will trap exactly what it needs to, due to the ubiquity of pokemon like heatran, excadrill, jirachi, and tyranitar.

the prevalence of tyranitar also damns gothitelle. dugtrio has no equivalent pokemon that consistently counter-traps it, but gothitelle cannot touch tyranitar. this is its strongest attack vs it: 252 SpA Gothitelle Hidden Power Fighting vs. 0 HP / 4 SpD Tyranitar in Sand: 164-196 (48 - 57.4%) -- 90.2% chance to 2HKO. it doesn't even have guaranteed odds to 2hko a choice scarf tyranitar if it predicts its switch-in correctly, never mind the commonness of bulkier tyranitar (which often has a chople berry, too). to worsen matters, gothitelle needs to give up hidden power ice, its weapon against dragons, to have essentially any shot at even denting tyranitar. even if the opponent doesn't switch to tyranitar on the gothitelle switch-in, they still can trap gothitelle after the fact and prevent it from doing anything else for the game's remainder.

lastly, it's hard to fit gothitelle on a team. it doesn't consistently check...anything. just about every viable pokemon, even the obviously offensive ones, checks something consistently. alakazam, with one of the worst defensive typings and 55/45/95 defenses, has encore, thunder wave, or even psych up to function as an emergency check to setup sweepers, and a guaranteed focus sash to stop fast pokemon from sweeping a team. cb terrakion consistently switches in on heatran and checks volcarona in sand. even specs tornadus checks breloom. what offensive threat can gothitelle consistently switch in on? sure, it can revenge kill some things, but try bringing it directly in on a specs politoed, life orb breloom, or keldeo and see what might happen. dugtrio can at least hard switch vs things like heatran in an emergency and take them out. not so with gothitelle.

wobbuffett is even less analogous to dugtrio. it has genuinely no versatility; the only thing you're unsure of with it is whether it's running safeguard or destiny bond, but even that is obvious when you check whether or not it has leftovers recovery. in order to check anything, it must take a hit from it. it has no utility outside of trapping. it almost never beats defensive pokemon, because they simply can elect to not attack it. it's hazard bait. it flounders versus mixed attackers. i don't think there's a tangible argument for banning wobbuffett, but you also can't dismiss it as collateral in a broader shadow tag ban. it's already bad enough that we can't use stoutland because excadrill is broken. if people are gonna mess with an old gen, i believe the onus is on them to make the ban have as little collateral as possible. not only should gothitelle and dugtrio be evaluated as separate cases, we should separately suspect gothitelle and wobbuffett.

Furthermore, if we want to talk about consistency and precedent, both SM OU and ORAS OU have banned said trapping abilities altogether. When only Gothitelle saw use, Shadow Tag was banned. When only Dugtrio saw use, Arena Trap was banned. There is no reason why BW OU should be any different.

this is a super dangerous hasty generalization. i've already articulated clearly in earlier posts why new generation tiering policy can't automatically be applied retroactively to old gens, so i'm not even going to touch on why the current gen and bw ou are separate cases. oras ou and bw are also different, but there's a key way in which they're similar. both require a discussion thread devoted specifically to the object of their ban. we have that with oras ou, but not with bw ou. if you really want to ban gothitelle from bw ou, fine. create a separate thread or try to convince the bw council to make an exit survey for it. you can't take the community's opinion on gothitelle to be the same as its opinion on dugtrio, though.

why are the tiers different? gothitelle saw much more use in oras ou than it has in bw ou. the metagames are radically different. the implications of trapping aren't even the same — gothitelle targets completely different stuff in oras ou than in bw ou, and trapping may even have different consequences in bw ou than oras ou. just as the current gen doesn't set any precedent for what happens in old gens, other old gens don't set the precedent for other old gens.

Diglett and Gothitelle are problems. Even if you don't fully see them as individual pokemon warranting bans by their presence alone akin to Dugtrio, what do we lose by simply extending the Dugtrio ban to one that includes these pokemon as well? If they are issues, even if to a smaller than usual degree for broken pokemon, we have a chance to improve the metagame. We should always rid the meta of unhealthy presences when we can and we can here in a very logical way. Considering the SM and ORAS bans, as well as the fact that non Dugtrio trappers are still seeing usage, we have a golden opportunity to ban Arena Trap and Shadow Tag from BW OU.

what do we lose by extending the dugtrio ban to unrelated pokemon? we decrease the diversity of viable strategies in the tier. fewer teams can exist. we encourage a dangerous precedent (could we not also waste time on a magnezone suspect in bw ou because it traps things? what about other trappers in old gens, like adv?). if you want to establish that gothitelle and wobbuffett damage bw ou as much as dugtrio, prove it. bring it to tour games. make it show up more in usage stats (it was only used in 3.06% of spl 9 bw games). facilitate discussion on it that goes beyond baseless theorymonning. until then, keep your fallacious argument out of my favorite tier.

 

[Haund]

posting this on behalf of LuckOverSkill

Gothitelle should definitely stay in the tier. I 100% agree with both Zard97 and steelskitty on this, Arena Trap has never had a huge (not even a minor one if we want to be completely honest) influence on the BW OU metagame over the course of the 7 years and a half that BW existed. Usage has always been low, and the only team with Gothitelle that has seen some sort of consistent play (if a small rise in usage that then died out rather quickly can even be considered "consistent") has been that one sun team with 3 trappers + Volcarona, of which we removed the biggest reason it was any good to begin with: Dugtrio. Gothitelle is a very weak Pokémon in the BW OU metagame, and very awkward to build with. It's only a revenge killer, requires a Choice Scarf to function, and has negative defensive utility, since it costs you a slot for a mon that is deadweight vs 80% of the tier, and the targets it removes are not staples like Tyranitar or Heatran, it only revenge kills certain mons under certain conditions (it doesn't even OHKO Terrakion or Keldeo). Sure, it can Trick a defensive Pokémon to make it useless, but then it loses its ability to revenge kill anything, and with Goth's lack of bulk and pitiful offensive presence you just traded a useless Pokémon to make an opposing mon as useless as Goth (arguable, since if you send Goth on a Ferrothorn or Skarmory you're still gonna get Spiked on), which helps in a very few select cases, but the impact of this trade isn't remotely comparable to Dugtrio's impact on a game with its trapping abilities. Banning Shadow Tag in BW OU is also very weird when Magnet Pull is being ignored, I know it sounds ridicolous (and it is), but as Zard pointed out Magnet Pull has been definitely the most impactful trait of all the trapping abilities over the course of the years, due to the popularity of the DragMag style, which is at its peak in BW due to all the powerful dragons in the tier compared to DPP and the lack of fairies compared to ORAS. Sure, Arena Trap might have been "unhealthy" (whatever the buzzword means, it's lost its meaning after reading it for every single mon in every single suspect), and I can understand the Dugtrio ban, even though I personally voted No Ban myself, but banning Shadow Tag sounds quite random. Magnezone and Gothitelle are very similar Pokémon in the sense that they both trap very specific targets and offer awkward defensive utility, but Magnezone's trapping ability is vastly superior due to the nature of the tier, since most viable teams will run a Steel type, and killing Steel types offers way more utility than trapping whatever Goth traps, and Gothitelle also will get countertrapped in roughly half of the games you run it, while Magnezone can at least be used as a sac slot and can give some momentum on weaker defensive mons. Also Gothitelle is a Psychic type that can't touch Tyranitar, and those are not very good in BW in the first place.

I personally don't care about Diglett, might as well ban Arena Trap now that we've reached this point, as Diglett does exactly the same job Dugtrio does, except 10 times worse, but Gothitelle should stay.