« Previous Article | Next Article » |
Art by Zephyr2007.
An old RU staple, Virizion was first introduced to the PU tier back in the mid-December tier shifts, and it immediately became an excellent wallbreaker. While it was at first slightly overshadowed by stronger wallbreakers like Sirfetch'd, Machamp, and Duraludon, their bans allowed it to establish itself as the tier's best one. Despite its average offensive stats, Virizion quickly became an issue to many due to its excellent coverage and Speed, making it extremely hard to reliably switch into and revenge kill; this led to its eventual suspect test.
This set is Virizion's best one, and it's not hard to see why; it's extremely hard to switch into due to its great movepool, solid Speed tier, and decent offensive stats. This is partly due to Leaf Storm's power; even Grass-resistant Pokémon like Weezing and Tangela struggle to comfortably shrug it off. Other common Grass-resistant Pokémon such as Talonflame and Whimsicott find themselves unable to switch into Virizion's coverage options, often limiting its counterplay to offensively pressuring it with faster threats like Sneasel and Archeops and specific defensive options like Garbodor and Golbat, which Virizion can still get past if they're weakened. Synthesis is an option for the last slot, as it allows Virizion to switch into various Pokémon like Palossand and Heliolisk more reliably and consistently, while Zen Headbutt always OHKOes Toxicroak and hits other Poison-types. Despite its large movepool, Virizion's lackluster offensive stats leave it forced out by most targets that aren't hit super effectively by its moves, like Mesprit and Silvally-Fairy, further limiting its wallbreaking opportunities against more offensive teams.
The main argument the ban side used was that its versatility made it almost impossible to reliably counter, with all of its sets having somewhat different answers. This is made even worse by all of its sets being able to choose what they wanted to beat due to Virizion's outstanding movepool. Moreover, they also believed that Virizion forced extremely similar team structures in an attempt to prevent it from running over teams. Lastly, Virizion isn't particularly easy to play around; it created a lot of 50/50 scenarios that were usually heavily skewed in the Virizion's user favor, making it very different from most Fighting-types.
The no ban side argued that, despite having defensive answers to all of Virizion's sets, none of its answers were niche or mediocre picks that would otherwise never get added to a team; they all provided much more than just a Virizion answer and were all rather easy to add on a team. While it is true that Virizion's versatility made it hard to safely switch into it, it's extremely reliant on having the right set and predicting correctly to plow through teams. Furthermore, they believed that Virizion's typing and Speed tier left it rather easy to offensively pressure it, which made preventing just how much it gets to do considerably easier. Similarly to the defensive answers, the offensive ones were all solid threats outside of simply pressuring Virizion. Finally, Virizion also didn't get many opportunities to switch into the field due to its susceptibility to getting crippled by many defensive threats it usually wants to switch into.
With Virizion staying in the tier, PU should remain rather stable until the next tier shifts in April. However, it might have to get looked at again when those happen; one of Virizion's most splashable answers, Talonflame, is predicted to rise to NU.
« Previous Article | Next Article » |