Yung Dramps
awesome gaming
We once again find ourselves in a familiar situation: After months of deliberation and meta shifts, Arena Trap has been banned out of the OU metagame yet again. Earlier on this generation, Shadow Tag was also allowed for a very brief time period, but it was quickly done away with as well, within days as a matter of fact.
As a bit of a review, here are all the decisions on these two abilities that have preceded this.
Gen 5: Arena Trap retroactively suspected and banned, Shadow Tag retroactively suspected and banned
Gen 6: Arena Trap retroactively suspected and banned, Shadow Tag suspected and banned
Gen 7: Arena Trap suspected and banned, Shadow Tag quickbanned
Gen 8: Arena Trap suspected and banned, Shadow Tag quickbanned
As you can see, the track record for these abilities is utterly abysmal. Out of what have been essentially 8 chances for either one to stick around as a healthy part of some OU meta, there have been only 3 situations where one or both abilities survived to the end of the generation, and all 3 of them ended up getting overturned later on once people figured out how to optimally abuse the capabilities of trapping. This is especially damning considering the overall aversion to retroactive tiering bar extreme, blatantly unhealthy situations like Sleep in BW or unusual circumstances like the DPP Ubers Arceus controversy. There have been bans that go back generations that would kill to have so many second chances. Ever since Blaziken was banned in BW, for instance, we have never looked back on it, not even in Gen 7 when there were fringe groups arguing that the meta’s power level had risen up enough for at least a suspect test to be warranted.
As I will explain soon the road to these choices (especially in the case of Arena Trap) was not controversy free, but I think one thing the vast majority agree on is that we can’t keep doing this shit every generation. We can’t just continue to waste the valuable first few months of future metagames regurgitating the same talking points on how bad trapping is, should we allow Diglett and Trapinch or not, so on and so forth until the end of Smogon’s lifespan. And this is why I have decided to make this thread; to provide a place where we can put this issue that has haunted our tiers since the advent of Team Preview to rest.
Now, at first the answer seems clear: the experiment has failed, preserving universal trapping in Smogon Singles is a lost cause, just keep it in the initial banlist for the generations to come. And y’know what? In a now-scrapped draft of this post I had a far more aggressive tone basically asking for exactly that. But more recently I have warmed up a bit to the idea of just banning the worst offenders and keeping around the more balanced trappers. We all know that Gothitelle and Dugtrio are unsalvageable, but as far as I know we have never had a meta where just Gothita is allowed, or a team preview meta where we gave Wynaut/Wobbuffet a whirl without Goth existing. Now, on the flipside there is the failed Gen 7 Dugtrio suspect test, where people experimented with Diglett and Trapinch and found they could have the same meta-warping power. I personally am still staunchly pro-banning trapping entirely, but unlike that first draft I now recognize this perspective as something worth looking into rather than something I formerly cast aside as ignorant and invalid. Just look at the discussion about Dugtrio in the OU On The Radar thread: There were definitely a fair share of people saying that banning AT as a whole was an overreaction, so it’s not cut and dry in the slightest.
Really, I think that in order to make some progress towards the final verdict on the matter this thread is looking for, we as a community need to come to the following consensus: Is near-universal trapping in 6v6, Team Preview Singles inherently uncompetitive? As for the answer to that it’d involve a lot of scouring and analysis of our policies I am not qualified to do. For that step and the others to come, I leave that to the readers.
As a bit of a review, here are all the decisions on these two abilities that have preceded this.
Gen 5: Arena Trap retroactively suspected and banned, Shadow Tag retroactively suspected and banned
Gen 6: Arena Trap retroactively suspected and banned, Shadow Tag suspected and banned
Gen 7: Arena Trap suspected and banned, Shadow Tag quickbanned
Gen 8: Arena Trap suspected and banned, Shadow Tag quickbanned
As you can see, the track record for these abilities is utterly abysmal. Out of what have been essentially 8 chances for either one to stick around as a healthy part of some OU meta, there have been only 3 situations where one or both abilities survived to the end of the generation, and all 3 of them ended up getting overturned later on once people figured out how to optimally abuse the capabilities of trapping. This is especially damning considering the overall aversion to retroactive tiering bar extreme, blatantly unhealthy situations like Sleep in BW or unusual circumstances like the DPP Ubers Arceus controversy. There have been bans that go back generations that would kill to have so many second chances. Ever since Blaziken was banned in BW, for instance, we have never looked back on it, not even in Gen 7 when there were fringe groups arguing that the meta’s power level had risen up enough for at least a suspect test to be warranted.
As I will explain soon the road to these choices (especially in the case of Arena Trap) was not controversy free, but I think one thing the vast majority agree on is that we can’t keep doing this shit every generation. We can’t just continue to waste the valuable first few months of future metagames regurgitating the same talking points on how bad trapping is, should we allow Diglett and Trapinch or not, so on and so forth until the end of Smogon’s lifespan. And this is why I have decided to make this thread; to provide a place where we can put this issue that has haunted our tiers since the advent of Team Preview to rest.
Now, at first the answer seems clear: the experiment has failed, preserving universal trapping in Smogon Singles is a lost cause, just keep it in the initial banlist for the generations to come. And y’know what? In a now-scrapped draft of this post I had a far more aggressive tone basically asking for exactly that. But more recently I have warmed up a bit to the idea of just banning the worst offenders and keeping around the more balanced trappers. We all know that Gothitelle and Dugtrio are unsalvageable, but as far as I know we have never had a meta where just Gothita is allowed, or a team preview meta where we gave Wynaut/Wobbuffet a whirl without Goth existing. Now, on the flipside there is the failed Gen 7 Dugtrio suspect test, where people experimented with Diglett and Trapinch and found they could have the same meta-warping power. I personally am still staunchly pro-banning trapping entirely, but unlike that first draft I now recognize this perspective as something worth looking into rather than something I formerly cast aside as ignorant and invalid. Just look at the discussion about Dugtrio in the OU On The Radar thread: There were definitely a fair share of people saying that banning AT as a whole was an overreaction, so it’s not cut and dry in the slightest.
Really, I think that in order to make some progress towards the final verdict on the matter this thread is looking for, we as a community need to come to the following consensus: Is near-universal trapping in 6v6, Team Preview Singles inherently uncompetitive? As for the answer to that it’d involve a lot of scouring and analysis of our policies I am not qualified to do. For that step and the others to come, I leave that to the readers.