Announcement np: SM OU Suspect Process, Round 5 - I Can't Escape Myself (ARENA TRAP BANNED)

[p2]

Dugtrio is one of the main forces in this tier forcing it into a downward spiral and making it incredibly stale and very very limiting on creativity. Dugtrio is ridiculous on every playstyle, whether it's offense, balance or stall purely because it makes offensive threats very difficult to keep in check reliably (think Chansey / Pex / Clef) for breakers like Zard Y / Ash Gren, the list of breakers goes on because Duggy honestly pairs up very easily with nearly any breaker because there's so many potential threats it can remove from the game. Pretty straight forward, you could compare it to something such as Magnezone for Pinsir, but they're so much harder to compare to Dugtrio purely because Magnet Pull traps, what, 5~ Pokemon in the tier, and not only that, it's incredibly inconsistent in finding ways around Ferrothorn / Celes. There are many times where Ferro / Celes have came out alive vs Magnezone and still managed to achieve their goal of walling threats they need to.

Dugtrio isn't like this, because it actually consistently removes threats and despite its terrible bulk it has plenty of opportunities to come in. Put it this way, Eject Button makes it extremely easy for Dugtrio to trap what it needs to, but its far more inconsistent in combination with Magnet Pull because you're not able to reliably trap threats that just throw off Leech Seeds / hazards all the time. I hope this clears up some of the comments about inconsistency between Arena Trap and Magnet Pull because they're just simply not comparable outside of the fact that they trap Pokemon.

Anyway the main thing I wanted to bring up, the reason why Arena Trap is being tested instead of Dugtrio. I'm honestly surprised people are actually questioning this given how testing Dugtrio goes against the tiering policy we currently have. A Dug test would be inconsistent because there are multiple abusers of the ability, and even if the main abuser goes, the other ones will still be able to fill the same niche as Dugtrio, albeit to a much smaller extent. Look at Diglett, it's legitimately horrible but it's still enough to reliably trap and remove Tyranitar and Heatran from the game with ease, two very easy to fit stallbreakers. On top of this, Diglett is still capable of trapping Chansey thanks to reversal. Trapinch does similar things but I don't really care about it. Removing Arena Trap is definitely the way forward with this sort of thing, because removing Dugtrio just creates precedent that we should unban Shadow Tag and only target the users of the ability instead, which just gets horribly messy.

tl;dr Dugtrio, Diglett and Trapinch are all bad Pokemon, but despite this they all have the necessary tools to remove the threats they need to. Removing them from the tier will be very beneficial as it won't needlessly restrict a huge amount of the meta, enabling more creativity in the meta too, while also lifting off pressure from handling threats such as Magearna as more consistent checks / counters to it will be available to use without the omnipresent threat of having dead weight / near-useless mons vs Dugtrio. Ban Dat shit and make this tier good

Sorry for ruining this tier w/ eject button lati btw :*

 

[Ming549]

While Dugtrio with arena trap has a massive effect on the game, I have to say I am leaning toward no ban. I really don't get this suspect because the only mons that really have trouble with Dugtrio are ridiculously good mons that are in the A-S ranks despite the existence of arena trap. Dugtrio is a very mediocre mon who can often be dead weight except against some of the top pokemon in the tier. Dugtrio sucks, like it is truly shit and since it is the only user of arena trap who is at all viable it is really the only one I will focus on (if someone wants to waste a team spot on diglett just to get rid of your Heatran then they deserve to get rid of it). Dugtrio still has pretty low attack stat despite the buff, it has no defense whatsoever and a speed tier that is strong but really isn't as good as it used to be in previous gens. Also, Dugtrio doesn't typically do its job and escape unscathed so while it is effective, I'm not sure it is broken. Finally, I hate the argument that arena trap is bad because it creates 50-50s. This is literally a game of 50-50s and oddly enough, the ability to switch is what creates most of these.

I want to talk about the positive effect Dugtrio has on the game for a minute. Personally I love that Dugtrio makes some of the top mons run sub-optimal items. It creates a cost benefit analysis that I think presents an ideal challenge for teambuilding. You can maximize the potential of mons by using ideal items or move or play it a little safer. Zard Y, one of Duggy's main buddies actually just dropped in the viability rankings. This drop was justified with just 3 words "Shed Shell Pex". Heatran can of course use shed shell as well. Tapu Koko is an outstanding mon who outspeeds Dugtrio and can simply U turn out of it. But people are mad because this fills a spot in the movepool of a completely dominant Pokemon with one move that is suboptimal against everything else. It isn't that these mons don't all have a perfectly viable answer to Dugtrio, it is that they are inconvenienced by having to use it. Chansey doesn't have a great answer but that is because Chansey being good is kind of a fluke due to its dependence on an obscure item that only it can really abuse effectively. However, if you want a special wall with a massive HP stat that you do not want to be trapped, you can always use shedshell Blissey. Personally, I love the diversity arena trap's presence in the tier adds. Dugtrio forces players to do some cost benefit analysis when using top tier mons instead of just making it so there is one optimal set for every situation. These pokemon such as Pex, Heatran and Chansey who would love to see less of Zard y and Duggy can form nearly unbreakable teams with each other along with Mega Sab, Lando t and Tangrowth if arena trap is removed. Other top tier mons such as Tapu Koko, Lele and Magearna would also like to see arena trap gone as well. The funny thing about this suspect is that everything who is bothered by Dugtrio is already a dominant top tier mon. Now this would be a case for banning arena trap if Dugtrio was actually dominant, but since it is actually a somewhat crappy mon that just does great against a lot of top mons, this suspect feels like it is just trying to pull out all the final roadblock for the top threats. All pokemon have upsides and downsides that go along with their typing. Right now, a lot of top pokemon happen to struggle with Dugtrio, poor flying types finally have an inherent advantage due to their typing which is generally a drawback for them (SR). So it is only fair that some of the top mons have a downside too. It still hasn't stopped them from being the best mons in the tier and if you don't like it, feel free to use something else.

In my opinion, getting rid of Dugtrio is just going to get rid of the main drawbacks for the mons who already run the tier and will eliminate alot of the diversity from the game until we finally get through the long and painstaking process of banning all the stuff that will become broken without it. Now that may or may not be worth it in the long run but the game won't be very fun for a while. Now I know a bunch of people were rubbing their hands together in anticipation of being able to say "broken checking broken isn't a reason to keep something in the tier" while reading this post, but is this really the case here? Dugtrio kinda sucks except against some of the top threats. So is this a case of broken checking broken or is it a case of a mediocre mon with a good ability checking potentially broken mons? Dugtrio has a huge impact but is it really broken? In my opinion, the answer is no and I really can't get behind the idea of banning something just because it has a large effect on the game and makes it more diverse.

So I can agree with several of your ideas here. By itself duggy is not a broken pokemon, it's offensive stats are ok at best and its defensive presence really just doesn't exist. I also agree with you that having duggy in the tier helps to hold back several of the top tier threats as you mentioned. But I do have to go against you with some of the sentiment expressed here. Firstly I would to talk about how you think "the only mons that really have trouble with dugtrio are ridiculously good mons that are in the A-S ranks". When was the last time you saw a raikou? How about volcanion? Terrakion? Sp Def excadrill? Alolan-Muk? The list runs on. These mons, some of which met success earlier in the gen, I'm looking at you AV alo-muk, have fallen off from earlier this gen/last gen with the main reason being dugtrio. Now I'm not saying that top tier threats arent hindered by duggy because some of them are, but looking at the big picture, duggy's popularity has also caused the downfall if not death of a multitude of other mons in a meta which could otherwise treat them well. So while you may use "it helps check top tier mons and thats it" as an argument, its not really an argument. It's a convenient excuse to overlook the other mons which duggy has killed and that we've all gradually forgotten about.

Secondly, when you say, "I hate the argument that arena trap is bad because it creates 50-50s. This is literally a game of 50-50s and oddly enough, the ability to switch is what creates most of these." I am sorry but when I read this I cannot help but hear a paradox. You are right this game is built on 50/50's and prediction. But duggy is a mon that eliminates this option of switching and therefor 50/50's. You might be right getting duggy in is the main part of this "50/50" but once its in thats it. Its inside and so are you. The 50/50 aspect of getting it in can also be voided by the fact that voltturn/eject button/sacks exist. I and multiple others have mentioned this before repeatedly that duggy is only beatable in this "50/50" stage if the person using dug decides to send it in recklessly. Thirdly when you say "These pokemon such as Pex, Heatran and Chansey who would love to see less of Zard y and Duggy can form nearly unbreakable teams with each other along with Mega Sab, Lando t and Tangrowth if arena trap is removed." I fail to see how you can simply make this assumption. The meta is always shifting and changing and making a bold statement like that without seeing how the meta settles is just not a good call to me. Idk again thats just me there, no logic or evidence backing it up just how i handle things. Finally, about the "long and painstaking" process that could possibly come with traps departure, thats ok. Even if duggy in your words, is just a mediocre mon keeping some top tier threats in check, thats ok. For suspects we should not think to make a call solely on the future state of things once the mon is gone. Because we just dont know. We won't know how the meta will settle. We wont know what will be good or bad. Its just a whole mess of hypotheticals and theorymoning that will leave us going in circles if we focus too much on it. This is a seperate suspect. An entity entirely its own and we should treat it as such.

 

[Of Moose & Men]

Okay, usually, I only reply to posts in suspect threads. But, with how absolutely terrible some of these "anti-ban" arguments are, I'd rather not waste my energy, so I'll be explaining why it absolutely needs to go.

I'll start by saying, this is a suspect test I've wanted to happen for 5 years now. Not because it is "broken", but because the ability is inherently noncompetitive. A key aspect to Pokemon is switching, there's no denying that. And much like Shadow Tag, Arena Trap removes that ability entirely, unless you run a below par item on a Pokemon that would otherwise prefer another item. Removing a major strategy from a competitive game is just plain silly, and I'm not sure what GF was thinking when they included it, but I digress. This is the foundation of my thinking. I believe the ability in itself, is noncompetitive in nature, and thus, unhealthy.

However, that has no details, and that's not very fun to read, so I will elaborate. Removing control from the player is what got Shadow Tag banned, and in the end, I feel as though that should be the reason Arena Trap should be banned. Forcing the opponent into a corner, and forcing them to play 100% optimally, while the Duggy user just preys on when they make one wrong move is ridiculous. Thing is, if the Duggy user is worth their salt, they will trap their target. Eject Button Latios/Pex/whatever 'mon lures in your "trapee" invites Dugtrio in to remove the 'mon you need it to, and they can do nothing about it. It's gone, it's dead. There's no "counter play" like with every other Pokemon in the game. And that's an enormous issue. Having no counter play is not ban worthy, BW Hydreigon is a testament to that. It was difficult to come into, but it could actually be "played around", you could switch on its moves, provided you predicted them correctly, but you could at least switch. With Dugtrio, your "counter play" is running Shed Shell and playing absolutely immaculately and anyone with a brain can see the issue there.

And, since Silver_Lucario42 just posted with their foot in their mouth, I'll take this new found information, and use it.

II.) Uncompetitive - elements that reduce the effect of player choice / interaction on the end result to an extreme degree, such that "more skillful play" is almost always rendered irrelevant

We've found our definition of Arena Trap. This is literally what Arena Trap does. It doesn't reduce player choice, it completely removes it. By definition, it is as "uncompetitive" as "uncompetitive" can be. Whether it is explicitly displayed in your conveniently chosen replays or not, Arena Trap fits the definition to a T. You can choose to ignore the blatantly obvious, but that doesn't change the fact it's true.

So, that's why it's noncompetitive, because the definitions set forth by people far better at this game than I, fit Arena Trap perfectly.

But, here's why it needs to go in the simplest of terms.

It removes Key Pokemon from your opponents team, which any good team builder can abuse to hell and back. The easiest example is everyone's favorite, Stall.

The issue with Dugtrio on stall, is pretty much the same as Gothitelle's issue. It removes stallbreakers, the Pokemon people run specifically to deal with stall. Dugtrio removes the Pokemon you carry to break stall, and you can do nothing about it. You can't play aggressively against stall, because the second you make one wrong move, and your stallbreaker is in on Dugtrio, it's gone unless it carries Shed Shell, which we've gone over, is just plain stupid to have to carry. So, now, your Stallbreaker is gone, is the game over? Not necessarily, you can still play it out and pull it, but anyone worth their salt will save their Dugtrio to remove any other possible problem Pokemon from your team. The ability to guarantee the removal of a would be "counter/check" is not "broken", but, the fact that once your "counter/check" is in on Duggy, and you have no choice in the matter is noncompetitive. That's just on Stall. Dugtrio can be ran on every team archetype. So, in the hands of a competent team builder, the same "removal of Problem Pokemon" applies, and again, it guarantees their removal.

Dugtrio and/or Arena Trap are not "broken", that term gets thrown around way too much, because I feel people don't care to think things through in these threads. It is however, as Silver_Lucario42 pointed out for us, the definition of "uncompetitive". And that is why it absolutely needs to go. It was the reason Shadow Tag eventually got banned, and I feel as though it should be the reason Arena Trap is banned.

Removing control from the player is inherently noncompetitive, and there is no room for it in a game where we try to make things as competitive as possible. Because of this, Arena Trap should be BANNED.

 

[Dziga]

I don't try to play seriously for quite a while, but I have been keeping track of the meta, and once I started looking more into the game, it was simple to realize that people were not happy with the current situation of Dugtrio in the metagame. One quickly realizes that Arena Trap brings an unhealthy aspect to the metagame: It removes the ability to switch from a significant majority of the current metagame, one of the core mechanics that define the game itself. This alone makes Dugtrio, but also Diglett and even Trapinch to go from absolute crap to competitive monster or at least viable in case of the prevos. If this doesn't give an idea of how powerful this ability is, just look at how certain Pokemon are having to run Shed Shell just to specifically counter a single Pokemon is stupid. I could go days talking more but it would be redundant copy past from previous beautifully conceived arguments, so I'll skip and say to Ban this thing for good.

 

[Immortal]

One of your main points makes absolutely no sense. You're calling it a mediocre pokemon and dead weight except against some of the top pokemon of the tier. That's damn near a contradictory statement.

For something to be effective against a significant amount of the most common and most effective pokemon of the tier is literally the opposite of mediocre and dead weight. That makes it incredibly valuable. That's not even getting into the reality according to the viability tier list Dugtrio is a A+ worthy pokemon and no one is disputing it or asking for a drop.

What you call a positive effect is the complete opposite. You even said it yourself: People are running sub-optimal items. And they're doing it simply because they're terrified of a single Pokemon destroying their teams. That's overcentralization. The exact opposite of what people want in a healthy metagame. You're forcing people to play worse just to not auto-lose.

And lastly: 50/50s are bad when one side, particularly the one forcing it, is rewarded so heavily for it while the opposing side is trapped in what basically amounts to a lose/lose scenario.

I'm not saying Dugtrio should drop, it is very viable but it speaks volumes that the mods who run the viability thread are refusing to raise it to S. It is because Dugtrio is usually only effective against 1 pokemon on the opposing team and it usually goes down with them or becomes dead-weight after. The truth is that Dugtrio doesn't fair well against most pokemon aside from the few specific threats it is designed to deal with. It is also true that most of these pokemon and/or their teams have a perfectly viable method of playing around Dugtrio. Also, Dugtrio is much better in theory than it is in practice. There are so many games where I use Dugtrio where I find myself wishing I had the sash set instead of the groud Z set or the scarf set. Dugtrio can be potentially devastating, nobody is denying it, however both top tier and lower tier mons have are plenty of viable options for dealing with it and it isn't ripping through teams by itself, it just has the ability to take out one key element of poorly built teams. Another point is that pokemon has to run suboptimal sets all the time to properly support their team. To me these small changes that many teams could make to stop Dugtrio are basically no different than Latios or Excadrill having to run defog/rapid spin respectively to support their SR weak team. Latios would probably rather run a hidden power and Exca would rather run SD but since their team requires them to run hazard control they do. This means they have to run a suboptimal move to support their team, just like Tapu Koko may have to do by running U turn on a team that would struggle with Dugtrio otherwise.

Next, you said people are terrified of a single pokemon destroying their team.This is literally never the case with Dugtrio. Dugtrio usually beats one pokemon per game and then its teammates clean up, meaning that people are afraid of a better designed team defeating their team, not one broken pokemon doing so. Typical broken mons themselves can threaten entire teams if their checks, which are often otherwise un-viable pokemon, are removed. This suspect is just caused by people being to lazy to do a decent job of team building and their unwillingness to put any set, item or pokemon on their team that is not the most optimal one. Instead of changing one item on one of their pokemon or switching one pokemon for another in order to make dugtrio dead-weight against their team, people are trying to legislate arena trap out of the game so that they can make a perfect team consisting of only top tier threats each of who is running their optimal set. Cost benefit analysis is a huge part of teambuilding but it seems nobody wants cost to be part of that anymore. Well built teams don't auto lose to Dugtrio.

50-50s are a massive component of the game that will never go away. If a player properly predicts a situation like this with a pokemon as frail as Dugtrio, then they should be rewarded for their risk. You said that these situations are really only risky for the team going against Dugtrio but this really isn't the case. Earlier in the thread someone mentioned a worst case scenario situation where one player had Zard y in vs a Tangrowth. The player with Zard had Dugtrio and the player with Tangrowth had Heatran. Sure, this is potentially a tough spot for the Tangrowth/Heatran team but there were a lot of plays and decisions that even got them to this spot. I'm really not sure how this specific senario when one team clearly has an advantaged proves brokeness but they overlooked tons of other factors such other mons on each team, their health, whether or not rocks are up etc. They also didn't mention that Zard Y can potentially handle this situation perfectly well by itself if it just uses flamethrower/fire blast. If Tangrowth stays it dies and if Heatran switches in then Zard can often just use Focus Blast to take it out the next turn depending on the Zard and Heatran set and whether or not Heatran has any prior damage. They are also overlooking factors that could make this a good situation for the Tang/Tran team. Heatran could have a shed shell with which to escape Dugtrio, it could have an air balloon which would allow it to kill both Groundium Z and scarf Dugtrio. It could also have an air balloon and magma storm which would allow it to kill sash Dugtrio or force it out which could be potentially very damaging for the Zard Y/Dugtrio team depending on their other teammates. So saying that this is always a lose-lose scenario for one team is just false.

 

[BeardyBennett]

Next, you said people are terrified of a single pokemon destroying their team.This is literally never the case with Dugtrio. Dugtrio usually beats one pokemon per game and then its teammates clean up, meaning that people are afraid of a better designed team defeating their team, not one broken pokemon doing so. Typical broken mons themselves can threaten entire teams if their checks, which are often otherwise un-viable pokemon, are removed. This suspect is just caused by people being to lazy to do a decent job of team building and their unwillingness to put any set, item or pokemon on their team that is not the most optimal one. Instead of changing one item on one of their pokemon or switching one pokemon for another in order to make dugtrio dead-weight against their team, people are trying to legislate arena trap out of the game so that they can make a perfect team consisting of only top tier threats each of who is running their optimal set. Cost benefit analysis is a huge part of teambuilding but it seems nobody wants cost to be part of that anymore. Well built teams don't auto lose to Dugtrio.

In just about any matchup, teams are going to have maybe one or two clear win-cons. And those win-cons are easy to identify right off the bat. One of my first thought at team preview is "okay I need to make sure Mon X doesn't get an opportunity to sweep me" followed by "okay, Mon Y on my team can get the win if I eliminate mons A and B". Dugtrio throws a wrench in this. Dugtrio can eliminate what blocks the opponent's win-con. Or it can eliminate your win-con. That matchup immediately slants heavily in favor of the Dugtrio user. Even if the team is well-built, that's the nature of the game we play. It can put you at such an extreme disadvantage, and it requires next-to-no-skill to do so. If you can sac a Mon and then manage to click Dugtrio and click the right move, that's all the skill you need to give yourself that advantage.

So no. Dugtrio doesn't destroy whole teams, but it can destroy team matchups with little skill from the opponent. It's literally just knowing what mons Dugtrio kills, letting that Mon kill something you might not need anymore, and then just not misclicking.

 

[KztxL7]

I'm not saying Dugtrio should drop, it is very viable but it speaks volumes that the mods who run the viability thread are refusing to raise it to S. It is because Dugtrio is usually only effective against 1 pokemon on the opposing team and it usually goes down with them or becomes dead-weight after. The truth is that Dugtrio doesn't fair well against most pokemon aside from the few specific threats it is designed to deal with. It is also true that most of these pokemon and/or their teams have a perfectly viable method of playing around Dugtrio. Also, Dugtrio is much better in theory than it is in practice. There are so many games where I use Dugtrio where I find myself wishing I had the sash set instead of the groud Z set or the scarf set. Dugtrio can be potentially devastating, nobody is denying it, however both top tier and lower tier mons have are plenty of viable options for dealing with it and it isn't ripping through teams by itself, it just has the ability to take out one key element of poorly built teams. Another point is that pokemon has to run suboptimal sets all the time to properly support their team. To me these small changes that many teams could make to stop Dugtrio are basically no different than Latios or Excadrill having to run defog/rapid spin respectively to support their SR weak team. Latios would probably rather run a hidden power and Exca would rather run SD but since their team requires them to run hazard control they do. This means they have to run a suboptimal move to support their team, just like Tapu Koko may have to do by running U turn on a team that would struggle with Dugtrio otherwise.

Next, you said people are terrified of a single pokemon destroying their team.This is literally never the case with Dugtrio. Dugtrio usually beats one pokemon per game and then its teammates clean up, meaning that people are afraid of a better designed team defeating their team, not one broken pokemon doing so. Typical broken mons themselves can threaten entire teams if their checks, which are often otherwise un-viable pokemon, are removed. This suspect is just caused by people being to lazy to do a decent job of team building and their unwillingness to put any set, item or pokemon on their team that is not the most optimal one. Instead of changing one item on one of their pokemon or switching one pokemon for another in order to make dugtrio dead-weight against their team, people are trying to legislate arena trap out of the game so that they can make a perfect team consisting of only top tier threats each of who is running their optimal set. Cost benefit analysis is a huge part of teambuilding but it seems nobody wants cost to be part of that anymore. Well built teams don't auto lose to Dugtrio.

50-50s are a massive component of the game that will never go away. If a player properly predicts a situation like this with a pokemon as frail as Dugtrio, then they should be rewarded for their risk. You said that these situations are really only risky for the team going against Dugtrio but this really isn't the case. Earlier in the thread someone mentioned a worst case scenario situation where one player had Zard y in vs a Tangrowth. The player with Zard had Dugtrio and the player with Tangrowth had Heatran. Sure, this is potentially a tough spot for the Tangrowth/Heatran team but there were a lot of plays and decisions that even got them to this spot. I'm really not sure how this specific senario when one team clearly has an advantaged proves brokeness but they overlooked tons of other factors such other mons on each team, their health, whether or not rocks are up etc. They also didn't mention that Zard Y can potentially handle this situation perfectly well by itself if it just uses flamethrower/fire blast. If Tangrowth stays it dies and if Heatran switches in then Zard can often just use Focus Blast to take it out the next turn depending on the Zard and Heatran set and whether or not Heatran has any prior damage. They are also overlooking factors that could make this a good situation for the Tang/Tran team. Heatran could have a shed shell with which to escape Dugtrio, it could have an air balloon which would allow it to kill both Groundium Z and scarf Dugtrio. It could also have an air balloon and magma storm which would allow it to kill sash Dugtrio or force it out which could be potentially very damaging for the Zard Y/Dugtrio team depending on their other teammates. So saying that this is always a lose-lose scenario for one team is just false.

Not going to S "speaks volumes"? No it doesn't. Are you saying that anything not S is shit? It sits on the same level of things like both Greninjas, Celesteela and Tapu Koko.

Being effective against one pokemon on the opposing teams is all it needs to do. If there is one Pokemon on the opposing team sitting between you and a sweep and Dugtrio eliminates and traps it then who gives a damn if it is dead weight afterwards? It did the thing it was supposed to do. Clear the way to victory.

What you listed weren't even sub-optimal choices. Every well built teams has some form of hazards. You'll be incredibly hard pressed to find a single team that doesn't run Stealth Rocks. Meaning that running Defog or Rapid spin isn't bad and will always find a use against every team.

Shed Shell on a Chansey exists solely for the sake of a Dugtrio. It's the same idiocy of Mega Pinsir having to run Earthquake solely for Aegislash in XY. You would never run these otherwise but because of a single Pokemon you have to run it.

You're repeating the same logic that people have dismantled long ago. A Pokemon does not need to destroy an entire team to be considered broken or ban worthy. Two Words: Mega Gengar.

No one is trying to eliminate 50/50s. We're trying to removed stupidly skewed risk/reward factors like the one Dugtrio forces.

 

[Immortal]

Not going to S "speaks volumes"? No it doesn't. Are you saying that anything not S is shit? It sits on the same level of things like both Greninjas, Celesteela and Tapu Koko.

Being effective against one pokemon on the opposing teams is all it needs to do. If there is one Pokemon on the opposing team sitting between you and a sweep and Dugtrio eliminates and traps it then who gives a damn if it is dead weight afterwards? It did the thing it was supposed to do. Clear the way to victory.

What you listed weren't even sub-optimal choices. Every well built teams has some form of hazards. You'll be incredibly hard pressed to find a single team that doesn't run Stealth Rocks. Meaning that running Defog or Rapid spin isn't bad and will always find a use against every team.

Shed Shell on a Chansey exists solely for the sake of a Dugtrio. It's the same idiocy of Mega Pinsir having to run Earthquake solely for Aegislash in XY. You would never run these otherwise but because of a single Pokemon you have to run it.

You're repeating the same logic that people have dismantled long ago. A Pokemon does not need to destroy an entire team to be considered broken or ban worthy. Two Words: Mega Gengar.

No one is trying to eliminate 50/50s. We're trying to removed stupidly skewed risk/reward factors like the one Dugtrio forces.

If your team is that poorly built that you know you will loose if you one dugtrio weak pokemon dies and you didn't give it a shell or build the rest of your team to prevent this then you are going to lose anyway, there are plenty of simple very viable ways around dugtrio.

Shed shell on Chansey isn't a thing at all, what are you talking about? It can't use anything except for eviolite or it is trash and you might as well use something else.

Mega Gengar is a very good pokemon with a great ability, not a mediocre pokemon with a great ability. Mega Gengar has better bulk, base 170 special attack, base 130 speed, good offensive typing, a good move pool and an outstanding ability that is arguably better than Dugtrios.

This makes it completely different from Dugtrio, who has base 35 hp, base 100 attack, base 50 defense, base 70 special defense, base 120 speed, a meh typing and a great ability that is its only real redeeming quality. So while they are both trappers this is a completely different situation because Mega Gengar was a very good pokemon who was also a great trapper as opposed to ending up as dead-weight either from the start or once it has taken out one pokemon

 

[Gary]

For what it's worth, when Deoxys-D was banned in XY, it was A+ rank, same with Goth which was like A- iirc. A Pokemon doesn't have to be S rank to be broken. Goth was just extremely uncompetitive due to the massive amount of matchup based scenarios it warped the meta into, and people, much like this gen, were having to run shit like Shed Shell Togekiss or Manaphy to break stall. Goth and Duggy are not splashable Pokemon, are very linear for the most part, compared to something like Landorus-T. However, they're uncompetitive nature alone makes them some of the most centralizing Pokemon in the metagame because of how it just turns so many matches into skill less bullshit. Dugtrio is being suspected because it's uncompetitive, for the very same reasons Goth was being suspected. Were Duggy and Goth S rank Pokemon that fit onto all kinds of archetypes and could sweep unprepared teams? No, but they're immensely uncomeptitive, and uncomeptitive does not equal an S rank Pokemon, but that doesn't exclude them from being suspect worthy. A Pokemon doesn't have to have Mega Gengar stats + trapping ability to be banned. The point is, Dugtrio and Goth were able to trap basically everything that broke stall, and forced the meta into a state of running subpar Pokemon with shitty items in order to not auto lose to stall, while being significantly worse against basically any other match up. That's exactly what Dugtrio does, so the "it's a shitty Pokemon with ass stats" is irrelevant and shouldn't be used as an anti ban argument. It still accomplishes its task, so in the end, who cares.

 

[Altervisi]

OK, from reading through these posts I've found 5 major points that keep coming up as an argument for an Arena Trap ban, I've got to say I now have a solid stance on the issue. BAN

1. Dugtrio essentially guarantees one kill, with very little skill involved. Although this in itself is not the major issue, the fact is that with the trapping a player can essentially pick and choose one mon of their opponents to remove, which as BeardyBennett mentions allows your opponent to remove your obvious wincon, when they only lose Dugtrio (maybe) after he has done his job.

2. Dugtrio forces other mons to run sets/items that are suboptimal in literally every other situation. Yep, Shed Shell, the only other situation I've ever seen this used effectively is on Skarmory against Magnezone, but Skarmory isn't grounded anyway. Tapu Lele, Hoopa-U, and pretty much any stallbreaker are forced to run Shed Shell, which limits their effectiveness in all other situations.

3. Dugtrio is broken on a large number of archetypes, the main problem being stall. Dugtrio is incredibly effective at what it does on any kind of team, the reason people bring up stall as the number one issue is that the archetype as a whole is broken with the presence of Dugtrio. Again his effectiveness at removing stall/wallbreakers means that every stall team has to have Dugtrio or they are playing at a huge disadvantage to other stall teams, not to mention the fact that Dugtrio is also an answer to Chansey, Toxapex and Clefable (to name a few).

4. Arena Trap is just Shadow Tag by another name. I know they are not exactly the same but if we look back at the reasons Shadow Tag was banned in the first place a lot of these reasons can be applied to Arena Trap and not affecting non-grounded pokemon is not enough of a counter, as this makes up such a small portion of OU.

5. Dugtio buff, Groundium-Z and Baton Pass banned. I think these 3 factors are the major reason that Dugtrio has slipped under the radar until this Gen, his attack boost combined with his Nuclear option in Groundium-Z further backs up the point that he guarantees one kill for players with even the least amount of skill. To a lesser extent, I believe the removal of another escape option in Baton Pass has also aggravated the situation.

Mega Gengar is a very good pokemon with a great ability, not a mediocre pokemon with a great ability. Mega Gengar has better bulk, base 170 special attack, base 130 speed, good offensive typing, a good move pool and an outstanding ability that is arguably better than Dugtrios.

This makes it completely different from Dugtrio, who has base 35 hp, base 100 attack, base 50 defense, base 70 special defense, base 120 speed, a meh typing and a great ability that is its only real redeeming quality.

But, this isn't an argument on whether to ban Dugtrio, Arena Trap is being suspect tested. The point that a pokemon with mediocre stats is so powerful only because of its ability is surely more of a ban argument than a counter point?

 

[Ricardo]

i don't even know what some of these posts are but here's my attempt at showing why dugtrio is not uncompetitive

first up let's look at the definition:

so basically uncompetitive elements make the players' choices have less of an impact on the game. let's look at some games where dugtrio is featured to see how much the plays influence the game

[wcop] ricardo vs. bushtush

match highlights

[team preview]
R!cardo's team:Clefable / Chansey / Dugtrio / Skarmory / Sableye / Toxapex
Bushtush's team:Tyranitar / Heatran / Mew / Landorus-Therian / Tangrowth / Greninja

ricardo is using spl stall. bushtush has three mons that are relevant against it from team preview: mega ttar, sub heatran, and sd rockium landorus t.

the first few turns progress normally enough. mew opts to burn mega sableye using synchronize. after this, bushtush is able to bring his heatran in on skarmory through a skillful double switch using his landorus t.

[turn 4]
Skarmory, come back!

Go! Chansey!

The opposing Heatran used Magma Storm!
Chansey lost 14.1% of its health!
Chansey became trapped by swirling magma!

Chansey is hurt by Magma Storm!

bushtush chooses to risk losing his heatran to eject button + dugtrio; however, this was risk/reward, not a 50/50. he knew that ricardo would be wary of heatran setting up a substitute on the potential eject button user, so magma storm was the best play.

chansey is steadily worn down by toxic + magma storm chip damage. when it is released from magma storm, it has around 30% of its health left. at one point heatran tries to set up a substitute, but chansey breaks it with seismic toss

[turn 10]
(Chansey's Natural Cure activated!)

Chansey, come back!

Go! Toxapex!

The opposing Heatran used Magma Storm!
Toxapex avoided the attack!
Turn 11

The opposing Heatran used Magma Storm!
It's not very effective... Toxapex lost 16.5% of its health!
Toxapex became trapped by swirling magma!
Toxapex is switched out with the Eject Button!

Toxapex, come back!

Go! Dugtrio!
Turn 12

Dugtrio used Earthquake!
It's super effective! The opposing Heatran lost 100% of its health!

The opposing Heatran fainted!

bushtush makes a play that i don't agree with at all by using magma storm again. i don't agree with it because it has no clear benefit-- chansey and toxapex are the only two mons (besides dug ofc) that can break heatran's substitute in one hit. if chansey stays in, it dies to toxic either way; if toxapex has shed shell then ricardo can just hard switch back to chansey on the probable earth power. magma storm was a bad play in my opinion even without factoring in eject button

if bushtush had clicked substitute here, he had a better position but possibly allowed chansey to recover. at this point he has to take advantage of chansey's low hp

he does this in the following turns by trying to pressure ricardo with his battle bond greninja. additionally, he utilizes sd rockium z landorus to weaken skarmory severely and set up stealth rock (however, he loses lando to counter). after threatening ricardo with greninja, bushtush doubles to his tyranitar on the clefable switchin.

[turn 22]
Clefable, come back!

Go! Skarmory!
Pointed stones dug into Skarmory!

The opposing Tyranitar's Tyranitarite is reacting to the Key Stone!
The opposing Tyranitar has Mega Evolved into Mega Tyranitar!

The opposing Tyranitar used Stone Edge!
A critical hit! Skarmory lost 6.6% of its health!

Skarmory fainted!
The sandstorm is raging.

Go! Dugtrio!
Pointed stones dug into Dugtrio!
Turn 23

Dugtrio surrounded itself with its Z-Power!

Dugtrio unleashes its full-force Z-Move!
Dugtrio used Tectonic Rage!
It's super effective! The opposing Tyranitar lost 100% of its health!

The opposing Tyranitar fainted!

tyranitar needed two dragon dances to outspeed dugtrio. with the switch to skarmory, it had the potential chance to set them up (unless skarmory had whirlwind). bushtush could have played around dugtrio here, but he instead hoped that ricardo didn't see the value in his clefable (as a switchin for gren's dark pulse). this was closer to a genuine 50/50 in that if clefable was dead or ttar was at +2, bushtush pretty much won. the difference was that he also had a chance if he mispredicted and dragon danced on clef, because ttar could live a moonblast or two.

in the end bushtush was able to activate battle bond but he ultimately couldn't break through ricardo's team because both resists (pex and clef) were still alive.

i don't see how dugtrio was "uncompetitive" in this match at all. in practice, it performed extremely differently from the skill free trapping monster people seem to be making it out as. it was never able to get a kill without a correct prediction

[wcop] ict vs. tdk

match highlights

[team preview]
ict's team:Charizard / Mew / Dugtrio / Toxapex / Tangrowth / Celesteela
pride & arrogance's team:Chansey / Dugtrio / Quagsire / Skarmory / Sableye / Tangrowth

both players are using dugtrio here, actually. tdk has a slightly different version of the dugtrio stall we saw in the last replay, while ict is using a zard y + dug build that saw lots of usage before the popularization of shed shell toxapex.

[turn 5]
TDKew, come back!

Go! TDKoxapex (Toxapex)!

The opposing undercurrents used Scald!
It's not very effective... TDKoxapex lost 3.9% of its health!
TDKoxapex was burned!
TDKoxapex is switched out with the Eject Button!

TDKoxapex, come back!

Go! TDKangrowth (Tangrowth)!

The sunlight faded.

ok here i want to talk about eject button.

some people have been bringing up eject button as a way to get dugtrio in without the need for prediction at all. the thing is that eject button is really hard to use correctly because it's such a passive item, and it essentially places a "lock" on the mon with it, meaning that you can't use that mon to switch in on anything until the thing that you want to trap comes in, otherwise it's gone. in this game we see ict mispredicting and losing his eject button.

[turn 22]
pride & arrogance withdrew malediction (Sableye-Mega)!

pride & arrogance sent out dead empire (Dugtrio)!

TDKoxapex used Scald!
It's super effective! The opposing dead empire lost 70.2% of its health!
The opposing dead empire was burned!

The opposing dead empire was hurt by its burn!
TDKoxapex was hurt by its burn!

here we see tdk attempting to remove toxapex with his own dugtrio, but getting burned by scald. although the burn didn't matter that much seeing as toxapex didn't pose much of a threat to tdk's team, it shows a prime example of dugtrio's inconsistency.

[turn 35]
TDKoxapex, come back!

Go! DugTDKrio (Dugtrio)!
Pointed stones dug into DugTDKrio!

The opposing serenity used Soft-Boiled!
The opposing serenity restored its HP.

The opposing serenity was hurt by its burn!

ict's dugtrio is able to trap tdk's chansey and eliminate it for zard y. in the current meta, however, this strategy would be much less effective due to the threat of skill swap chansey, which has seen use recently.

zard y wins after this not much to say

this isn't an example of dugtrio being broken or uncompetitive, it's an example of a stall team not prepared for it. stall needs to run skill swap chansey if it wants to prepare for zard y dug, just like it needs its own trapper if it wants to prepare for mons like hoopa u and specs lele. you could say that "forcing people to run shed shell/skill swap chansey is unhealthy" but how about stall teams being forced to run dugtrio to not get 6-0d by mega mawile? that seems pretty unhealthy to me

personally i'm not sure whether i'll be voting ban or no ban but i think the no ban side deserves better representation than "it's needed to beat top tier threats". thanks

So, i don't really tend to talk nor read these threads because 90% of the time people just say retarded shit without any grasp of meta knowledge or complex thinking in mons and say some really stupid things but since you pointed out my game in specific i thought i'd give another take on it.

So, first things first, the prep.
I didn't really have any info on Canada's builders and tendencies and my opps Hector Hard Mode/Bushtush didn't have enough info to specifically prep for them so i wanted to go with something solid and chose stall because it's my best playstyle.
I didn't have enough experience with Double Defog stall as i wanted at the time so i just decided to go with spl stall but there was one issue: the team was completely known for obvious reasons.
So i grabbed the original spl stall and adapted it to the current meta, changing a couple of things.
-Sub Groundium over sash to fuck with all those Bulu + Mon Trapped by duggy (ex: heatran, Marowak, Mawile) cores (Groundium doesn't get affected by terrain)
-Eject Button Pex to grab extra kills vs multiple breaker teams through free switch ins ( a well played duggy on stall can get around 2 kills )
-Whirlwind Skarmory to beat Sub mons (Bulu, Lando, Pinsir, Zygarde, Heracross)

Keep in mind that i didn't tell anyone about these changes and the result of that affects the outcome of the battle.

Your first nitpick is how he played Heatran but his Heatran was pretty much doomed to getting trapped because that's how Dugtrio works lol, Duggy doesn't allow you to proceed with games because your win con just gets trapped and you lose 100%, it forces you to play sub optimally like no other mon and by this, halting game progress.
If bushtush did what you said and subbed and i happen to heal with chansey, toxic takes me to an amount of hp where i can recover on a decent amount of stuff like mew, tang, gren. After healing i can switch into pex and keep heatran subless so i proceed to trap it after pex dies and pex was way more useless than chansey in this matchup, if that occurred then i could even pp stall him with pex chansey, forcing him to waste storms predicting duggy or trapping pex chansey to actually dent them. The reason busth did that play was to guarantee a kill on chansey over heatran because ash gren becomes dangerous when the primary check was phys def pex especially without black sludge. The payoff of dead chansey was too much for him to pass and i used that + my updated version to lure his heatran into attacking me and trap him with dugtrio, bush was forced to sack his best win con vs my team just to get some kind of progress into the game.

The tar exchange wasn't also quite as simple as you're making it out to be.
Something to help your "argument" is that every dd tar should be jolly so he only needed +1 to outspeed dugtrio.
Hard skarm was always the play since if he attacks then groundium kills it and since he didn't know i was groundium, he thought i couldn't ohko him so a dd was safe vs duggy and attacking also caught a choke in case i went clef since that would seal the game for ash gren's dark pulse.
If he chose to dd then he'd have to kill skarm because of ww and then clef could just pp stall edge. The rest of the team couldn't pressure clef outside of gren's pump which got pp and regen stalled.
There was nothing close to a 50/50, he had to bank on a catch all play by me choking.

All of this to reach a conclusion: "i don't see how dugtrio was "uncompetitive" in this match at all. in practice, it performed extremely differently from the skill free trapping monster people seem to be making it out as. it was never able to get a kill without a correct prediction"

How did you not see how dugtrio was uncompetitive lol, it practiced exactly how it's supposed to work in theory: get 1 game winning kill.
Dugtrio didn't even need to come out to be a threat, it forced bush to play sub optimally because he couldn't kill things with his stallbreaker, it locked the game the moment it got in and games should not be lost because of 1 turn that you can't be avoided because once dugtrio is in, you can't do anything, you literally lose the game in 1 turn and can't do shit about it lol. That's not really competitive, is it?
And just because i actually had to play well in order to get dugtrio in doesn't mean it's any fair for me to outright win the game from there, that's like giving me a win because i doubled on my opp 1 turn. You can even look at it on the other side and see what a good player does with dugtrio.
After his heatran died, i just handled basic threat management with my fat mons. Dugtrio forced a kill on the threat in 1 turn and then it was simple from there.

I won't address the rest of your post since i don't care about it, i just wanted to talk about my game since there was a lot more than just what you said and i thought that giving my take on it would shed some light on your arguments regarding the game between me and bush.
I'm not calling out your post though, i actually respect that you're using tour replays to back up your arguments as i believe tour play has a higher skill level, therefore showing how these mons perform at the highest level.

 

[Siggu]

There is a thing here and it's that the whole "trapping forces you to do sub-optimal plays" isn't entirely true, because then the supposed optimal play wasn't actually optimal, and the sub-optimal play is actually the optimal one (Shed Shell is another story, as you are sacrificing a good deal of match-ups for just one). I'd like to compare it to thinking of capturing a piece in chess, only to end up in a worse situation afterwards - so you don't try to do that.

Now, there's a huge difference between "That exchange wasn't a good idea after all, now I have to go from behind" (which is basic sacrifice tactics for a revenge kill) and "This is now unwinnable", and passive trapping tends to cause the latter.

That being said, I think the problem is caused by how increasingly difficult matchups are to take care of in each generation. Say, in BW, the weather war metagame, Dugtrio could potentially trap all weather setters bar Hippowdon (and Abomasnow, but that's not the point). That didn't make it unhealthy like it is right now because in BW you could still play around that loss, and also because it was practically everything it could do, unlike now where the targets have drastically risen thanks to Z-Moves and the Attack buff.

It's not the case now. 6 slots are simply not enough to take care of everything, let alone having Pokemon that can take on everything. All it takes is the trapper (such as Dugtrio, but I've seen things like Diglett in lower tiers, which are also affected by this suspect) to switch into your win condition for the given matchup and KO it (pretty easy given Dugtrio's excellent Speed and access to powerful moves). Then you can just forfeit because you are not going anywhere.

Dunno about everyone else, but I wouldn't like to play a game where the match becomes a lost cause from one turn to another not because of a very bad mistake of a great play from the opponent.

I would have personally gone straight forward to banning all trapping abilities, as inferior Magnet Pull is right now (the DragMag days are long gone), but an Arena Trap ban will suffice for now.

 

[Tramuntana]

yeah I thought this might come up, basically what you have elaborated on is one of the core arguments of banning duggy, the forcing of unoptimal plays on the part of the person playing vs duggy. The reason and justification that many people would like duggy banned is because he is able to force unoptimal plays. For example lets say you have your koko in on a mantine, do you click the elec move? Under normal circumstances yes but in the case of duggy in the back, your paranoid of it switching in and so go for u-turn, well if mantine stays in then you've kind of been cheated out of a kill, but if you do go for elec move and they bring duggy in and it is hypothetically scarfed, then ur koko is dead. While this is a 50/50, what bothers me about this type of play is that there is no recovering, you cannot switch into an appropriate check/counter/sack/anything. Your mon is just dead. This point and concept has been elaborated upon multiple times by the pro-ban group.

First, that also applies to Latios usind Draco Meteor while Weavile is on play, or Scizor using Bullet Punch near Magnezone, or a defensive pokemon using Toxic near Mega Diancie. 50/50s are a part of the game, especially since the advent of Z-moves; apply to a lot of situations, and will go nowhere. There is a reason talking about them as arguments for or against a ban got outlawed.
BTW if you are honestly walled by Mantine, and thus by extension any other super-passive bulky water type, and you have to rely on Tapu Koko exclusively and spam electric attacks to bypass him, I got bad news for you: your team needs serious reworking.

But the thing with duggy is that its not even ground weak mons that it can successfully trap. It has a whole plethora of threats that it has no trouble trapping/killing/toxicing/mementoing/etc. we've already mentioned things like chansey, clef, pex, ground weak mons, but the range is much larger. Mega Medi, Mega Gallade, Garchomp (If non-scarf with a bit of prior damage), Gengar(If non-scarf and duggy has pursuit), manaphy(again a bit of prior damage), etc. Duggy's trapping capabilities are very diverse and can be used in many matchups. Also building a team that has no ground weak mons is a perfect example of just how much of a grip duggy has on the meta. Pokemon have weaknesses for a reason. Building a team while consciously excluding all weaknesses to a certain type should be sending a red flag that something is wrong with meta.

That's why I mentioned to ban Groundium-Z+Arena Trap instead of Arena Trap entirely as it is the only variant capable of doing a number on any team. It was mentioned above how Gothitelle only became absolute cancer with the TrickScarf sets.

Again just another reason showing how pivotal duggy is in the meta. Displaying how one mon in the meta can have such a grip on the item choices of several other mons, not a good idea.

Then I guess Magnezone is boken too for forcing another defensive pokemon that can totally work even with Shed Shell. Shed Shell on Toxapex hinders nothing on his defensive abilities. About Heatran, Substitute is a better alternative to Shed Shell anyway. Nobody should run Stealth Rock on Heatran as Landorus is just that much better at setting up Stealth Rock. Also, are Zygarde, Landorus or Garchomp broken for forcing some steel types like Empoleon to run Shuca Berry to have a chance of defeating them? Nope. If Dugtrio forced you to go with a harmfull item, taht would make more sense, but Shed Shell has no inherent downsides at all, it's only that in defensive pokemon Leftovers is SO good it makes any other item mediocre in comparison.

I dont think anybody mentioned BP at all from what I've read. This is an unrelated topic.
I think so far all the points that I mentioned here have been thoroughly elaborated upon already and specific examples have been given for almost each one. At this point it feels like we are going in circles already. Almost if not every single one of these points has already been brought up and elaborated upon.

That point was about complex bans in general, they have worked well in the past, and we have gone too paranoid about them.

Also, painting Dugtrio as a Skill Free monster is absurd. It can only enter freely after a kill, or against the true no-skill no-brainer 100% safe to use monster in the game: U-turn, and to a lesser extent Volt Switch, and similar moves.

 

[Mr.Goxel]

Arena trap isn't op it's just really unhealthy for metagame development. People have already explained a ton above me so I won't go into detail but it's not as op as some people are making it out to be. If it was then Pokemon like Heatran and Toxapex wouldn't be as good as they are. There is definite counter play to arena trap but I'm still pro ban.

To compare greninja is similar to dugtrio. Bad Pokemon good ability. But Greninja takes actual skill to use and is not a brain dead piece of shit. I don't like this mechanic where I'm at a disadvantage for killing someone's Pokemon. I should be in an advantageous position for doing that

Ban this shit

Edit: I understands you can still be in a disadvantageous position even when killing but with dugtrio it's so much easier and so much worse.

 

[Tramuntana]

Did you really just suggest having zero grounded mons as a justification to keep Arena Trap? You do realize that's the definition of constraining teambuilding and overcentralizing the Meta game? Not only that, the other Ground mons you mentioned are not comparable to Dugtrio. They can all be switched around and played around, and are all perfectly manageable. Dugtrio literally cannot be switched around on barring Shed Shell or your opponent being bad and bringing it in on something it doesn't trap.

And speaking of these arguments people make of predicting Dug switching in. What game are you guys playing? I've never seen a good player bring in Dugtrio on anything but an advantageous VoltTurn, EB, or revenge kill. Otherwise you lose its Sash which potentially compromises it later on with hazards, priority, etc. And if there's no Sash, it likely is straight-up gone. Maybe I'm missing something, but the goal of Dugtrio is to come in for free and guarantee a kill on something that is either blocking one's win-con or is a win-con. I really don't think the bizarre claim of "predicting a Dugtrio switch" is very viable.

No. I just suggested to not run sets that are easy bait for Dugtrio, like Stealth Rock Heatran. Landorus is that much better rocker anyways, please, and Magma Storm variations can be helpful by catching Toxapex while you're at it, except if it runs Shed Shell, that supposedly is exclusively for Dugtrio. I remind you, I am agaisnt banning Dugtrio or Arena Trap as a whole, as it has a lot to offer to the meta, and having a semi-reliable way set up your win condition to sweep is one of the few things left that can save you from a bad matchup. However, if Groundium-Z+Arena Trap gets proposed, I'll be the first to vote for a ban, as this move eliminates the main drawback that has kept Dugtrio balanced since the beginning: It's lack of kill power. That's what my arguments are focusing around: HOW Dugtrio would be WITHOUT the brutal move.

Wihout Z-Ground, all you need is keep up Grassy Terrain when you want to go for a kill with something that dislikes Dugtrio, and it's absurd ability to stop Specs Lele, Manaphy and many other wallbreakers gets practicaly eliminated, as you will have to get them below 50-40% before going for the kill. Yeah, that can still happen if you say, send Tapu Lele to try to block Bullet Punch and get U-turned, but hey, that was your fault for not simply sending something that just takes laughable damage from Bullet Punch like Hippowdon, Charizard, Landorus, or (insert water type here). With a "super situational not trappeable" hazards setter like Landous, Skarmory, Garchomp, Ferrothorn or Azelf, Sash Dugtrio gets completely screwed up until the opponent somehow manages to connect a Defog.

What's more, without Groundium-Z, many defensive walls can just ignore Dugtrio: Clefable cannot be safely trapped without the groundium as you need two EQ+a screech for a KO, and leaving Clef to 40% is never worth loosing Dugtrio, AND that ignores having rocks set on you on the switch in the proces, or the possibility of Dugtrio dying/being forced out without even doing damage if it eats a Moonblast, apart from the non-negligible chance of Screech missing that will happen sooner or later. Chansey needs to be catched in a Softboiled/Stealth Rock for you to have a chance of killing him, and "super uncommon" Toxic variants have a decent-at-worst chance of winning regardless with careful use of Softboiled due to the reliance on Reversal. And Toxapex can surive a -2Earthquake with the right spread, Scald can burn, AND again you have to catch a Toxic Spikes, with the extra pressure that if it gets a single layer, Dugtrio will die to Scald+poison damage 99,9999% of the time. And thanks to regenerator, again leaving Toxapex at low health has little impact with careful play afterwards.


Somebody above made a chess metaphor. Well, the difference there is that cleanly loosing a single knight or bishop (AKA loosing a wallbreaker or a cleric) from an equal position is not an intant GG, as it is in chess, you can keep going and try to stage a comeback wihout having to pray for the opponent to blunder away a completely won game. In fact that is the main reason I prefer Pokemon to chess despite the RNG shenanigans: we don't have what is called an unsumourtable unstable equillibrium.

Having backup counters or checks has awasys been a common practice to try to prevent that annoying critical hit from unfairly killing you right there. Same applies there: Don't just rely only on Heatran to defeat Charizard, have something else that is NOT completely stomped by a variant that packs Focus Miss or Earthquake, wich not even Shed Shell Heatran will save you from.

 

[Ming549]

First, that also applies to Latios usind Draco Meteor while Weavile is on play, or Scizor using Bullet Punch near Magnezone, or a defensive pokemon using Toxic near Mega Diancie. 50/50s are a part of the game, especially since the advent of Z-moves; apply to a lot of situations, and will go nowhere. There is a reason talking about them as arguments for or against a ban got outlawed.
BTW if you are honestly walled by Mantine, and thus by extension any other super-passive bulky water type, and you have to rely on Tapu Koko exclusively and spam electric attacks to bypass him, I got bad news for you: your team needs serious reworking.


That's why I mentioned to ban Groundium-Z+Arena Trap instead of Arena Trap entirely as it is the only variant capable of doing a number on any team. It was mentioned above how Gothitelle only became absolute cancer with the TrickScarf sets.


Then I guess Magnezone is boken too for forcing another defensive pokemon that can totally work even with Shed Shell. Shed Shell on Toxapex hinders nothing on his defensive abilities. About Heatran, Substitute is a better alternative to Shed Shell anyway. Nobody should run Stealth Rock on Heatran as Landorus is just that much better at setting up Stealth Rock. Also, are Zygarde, Landorus or Garchomp broken for forcing some steel types like Empoleon to run Shuca Berry to have a chance of defeating them? Nope. If Dugtrio forced you to go with a harmfull item, taht would make more sense, but Shed Shell has no inherent downsides at all, it's only that in defensive pokemon Leftovers is SO good it makes any other item mediocre in comparison.




That point was about complex bans in general, they have worked well in the past, and we have gone too paranoid about them.

Also, painting Dugtrio as a Skill Free monster is absurd. It can only enter freely after a kill, or against the true no-skill no-brainer 100% safe to use monster in the game: U-turn, and to a lesser extent Volt Switch, and similar moves.

What we're saying is duggy in essence LITERALLY eliminated the 50/50, that is what I and the rest of the proban arguments HAVE been saying. And one of the main issues with duggy is the super wide range of mons it has the ability to effectively trap. I only used the koko mantine scenario as an example of what the blatantly obvious play would be in a situation like that would be. I hoped it would be looked a separate interaction between a couple mons, not as an entire game. Banning only groundinium would not inherently solve the problem, also remember we're testing trap, not only duggy. Duggy would still be able to abuse trapping effectively even if we banned groundinium, I've mentioned before how his screech+reversal+sub+eq set can get the job done regardless of z. Duggy can also be found running scarf these days specifically for koko, he's not limited to one set, there are multiple things wrong with duggy and only attacking one set just isn't gonna cut it. I have already explained how mag and duggy are different, it was in one of my earlier posts, pls refer to that. Last thing saying it can "only enter" on a sack, voltturn, or button is literally not helping you out. The fact that duggy has these options to get it in and the fact that it can successfully trap SO much of the meta is why we believe it deserves a ban.

 

[pika pal]

There is a thing here and it's that the whole "trapping forces you to do sub-optimal plays" isn't entirely true, because then the supposed optimal play wasn't actually optimal, and the sub-optimal play is actually the optimal one (Shed Shell is another story, as you are sacrificing a good deal of match-ups for just one). I'd like to compare it to thinking of capturing a piece in chess, only to end up in a worse situation afterwards - so you don't try to do that.

Now, there's a huge difference between "That exchange wasn't a good idea after all, now I have to go from behind" (which is basic sacrifice tactics for a revenge kill) and "This is now unwinnable", and passive trapping tends to cause the latter.

I think a major fallacy in your chess comparison is that in Chess, while you can't quite predict your opponent's moves outright (insofar as their choice and greater strategy), every piece has a fixed set of options you know it can take within the specific game you are playing. By comparison, in Pokemon you have a list of options a Pokemon CAN bring to a game that are in many cases significantly wider than what they are actually carrying. As a consequence, you have a significantly greater number of eventualities to prepare for, and when Dugtrio is the ultimate punishment for a wrong move, having so many ways to make a "wrong" move is an extreme amount of pressure relative to how easily such a situation can come up.

The comparison is also a hard sell because the idea of Chess is both players have the same set of pieces and try to out maneuver each other, whereas in Pokemon, you take a few out of a massive pool and try to tailor them to synergize and cover as many of the hundreds of opponents as possible. In Chess, both players have the same pieces to counter each other equally, 2 Knights, Rooks, etc. But in Pokemon, your teamslots don't afford you the luxury of preparing harder for any threat than another in a dedicated manner without compromising your team structure, so it's hard to build teams that, even with good synergy, don't still lean hard on a particular win condition for a particular playstyle.

Arena Trap would be like preventing the opponent from moving their own pieces when one of your own moves into "Check", since there's no means to respond to Dugtrio that does not either gimp the team ahead of time or was not eliminated simply by it being in play. And the sub-optimal play thought you had earlier underlines the issue, in that Arena Trap makes a move optimal when it would be sub-optimal against literally any team that did not have this particular piece. It's a similar spirit (not degree, to be clear) to how Mega Pinsir ran EQ over Close Combat for Aegislash and nothing else; one can argue Aegislash's presence made EQ "optimal", but when literally every other match up has Pinsir prefer CC, if not outright need it to win, then it more shows Aegislash is not letting Pinsir play to the best of its potential against everything else, often including Mons in has every right to beat for the team considering the limited slots and the increased load on each team member.

 

[pharaohcalvin]

This is a genuine question I'm not trying to be facetious, but how can something be uncompetitive if it is not strong enough to be used?

For a question for the rest of the forum are there any other cases where an ability is banned and not just a Pokemon (other than Power Construct, but this is just basically a ban on Zygarde 100%)?

Being uncompetitive is basically saying that design wise it is broken. When something is broken design wise, it can only ever be overpowered or underpowered but never balanced because as soon as it becomes good enough to be used the form of game play it promotes starts to take over. For example, as soon as Area Trap becomes good, mons start to run undesirable item in the form of shed shell, and the stall archetype warps itself around the ability.

 

[smogonModsAreTrash]

I'm really on the fence with an Arena Trap ban because I think the current meta is one of the best we've had in years with so many different teamcomps being viable. Yes, philosophical arguments have been made about the ability but everyone knows deep down this thread is really Dugtrio Suspect #2 in relation to its ability and movepool and in context of past tournaments/meta trends. Quite frankly it is a huge waste of time to discuss Diglett or Trapinch. A lot of this stuff is highly subjective (for example, SR punishes switches and is overcentralizing but we're okay with that for many different reasons-don't respond to this that derails the thread its just an ex.) and that's what makes the discussion interesting.

The pro-ban arguments have been articulated and are fairly well written, but I think there are some wonderful arguments against a ban that haven't yet been made. I just wanted to clarify a few things since many are arguing semantics or talking about different issues and there's some things that must be clarified in general.

Which are the sets/tactics/teamcomps causing the largest issue?

There's been a lot of discussion on Sash sets (even with sash you can run screech to remove or heavily cripple Chansey) and the ever prevalent Z-Earthquake which allows guaranteed damage and removal of many physically frail pokemon or even weakened ones. Dugtrio has a very decent movepool and after running Earthquake has many options in Sucker Punch, Sub, Toxic, Reversal, Pursuit, Memento, HP Ice, Endure, Screech, Stealth Rock, Stone Edge/Rock Slide, and even Rock Tomb(gained prevalence lately). Is this too much? Not having the right combination of moves renders Dugrio far less useful.

There is the issue with Eject Button which has also been addressed, (using a second pokemon and equipping an item to augment Dugtrio's ability) as well as the assumption that Dugtrio has Defog support and multiple teamates to pivot to/opportunities to come in.

I ladder with BC Wishkiller's team a lot and one thing that struck me was just how useful Whirlwind/Roar/Dragon Tail can be. Heatran, Chansey, and Bisharp, all vulnerable to Dugtrio are on the team but I rarely have any issues.

Haze is far more used than actual forced switch abilities so when you have a pokemon significantly impaired by all three hazards, why aren't Roar/Whirlwind/Dragon tail being used more often? The issue with Dugtrio is that it removes your ability to be in control and make certain decisions so moves like Whirlwind on Skarmory are invaluable. Counter Skarmory may have certain advantages, but the Brave Bird/Whirlwind set is just as good and far better against Dug. Not every team can afford to run Skarm but even pokemon like Skill Swap Chansey are being used to outplay Dugtrios. Is this anymore overcentralizing than having a Lando-T switchin or being forced to take HP Ice on physical attackers for 4x weak pokemon or having entire groups of teams rendered unviable because they're cleaned by boltbeam Magearna? Pokemon like Pex/Chansey/Skarmory are so essential to teams by walling entire swathes of the metagame that they are geared towards consistency so quite a few run Shed Shell/Skill Swap and I think that's fine.

Even today the meta is evolving at a frightening pace and there are many viable options/tactics that can be employed which simply aren't. I think many want to use the same offensive/defensive threats to just play the entire meta and get annoyed when losing to a well played Dugtrio or just have teams that are super Dug weak.

Even if you need to send in your Dugtrio-weak breaker to kill/revenge a mon, the situation is analogous to clicking specs Draco Meteor on Latios, killing a pokemon, then having Ttar or a boosting sweeper come in. You temporarily lose momentum by making certain moves or killing pokemon as the opponent can make the optimal switch.

Dugtrio can be taken advantage of with smart switching and understanding your wincons(if said wincon is removed by dugtrio, don't leave it in recklessly and take the aggressive choice in the 50-50s (move that kills the duggy) before getting greedy. analyze your opponent's play since they're probably using stall and the game will have many turns anyway). Is it unfair that the opponent can mindlessly send in Dugtrio and remove a core member of your team? Sure. But it's just as mindless to click Chansey when you see a special attacker or scald user without knockoff. Dugtrio introduces more complex thought and an offensive means to an otherwise horrifically boring playstyle. An argument can be made that Pokemon is inherently an uncompetitive game and differing methods/degrees of unfairness are employed to deal with other uncompetitive/unfair stuff.

Another question I wanted to ask is what we're going to do after this suspect test. There have been no suspects for months since the last test. Given that the new game is coming out in a few months, will there be additional suspect tests to help stabilize the meta after removing such an integral part of it?

The second bolded segment doesn't need to be discussed but it must be briefly addressed by people in power or with understanding of the situation. Everyone is going to be thinking in the back of their minds "what happens next." We can ladder now, but like the time period where we decided to keep Dugrio/Arena Trap in OU, the meta continued to develop considerably and many peoples' mind changed. It's not the place to discuss other suspect tests-*cough* Magearna-but regardless of what anyone says it will be factored into a lot of peoples' minds.

edit: it's acting up and not letting me edit the content of my post but duggy suspect was like 2nd or 3rd not latest and I typed tran instead of ttar my b I'm tired. I also just wanted to come in and type the bold stuf and write 3-4 sentences not this much. I'm so disappointed in myself
edit2: made the edit I think can't see changes

edit3: not going to clog the thread with more garbage but the poster below me doesnt get that bandedd ttar or even regular ttar kos a -2 latios with pursuit/pursuitx2/crunch. also you can run substitute on your heatran (this won me so many games in 1700-1800 elo because ppl just assume bc wishkillers team is the same) or similar pokemon to ease prediction against duggy and ko with like Magma or go sub on your breaker which likely will be spamming no more than two moves. Substitute is great against stall (avoid status/knockoff and only 1 or 2 mons can break a sub) and dug.


edit4: yeah I think I'm going to be voting to ban if I can manage to get reqs. glicko not close enough sadly, but the suspect ladder is really fun.

 

[LordHelix]

Not to sound hostile or calling u out, but im gonna answer some of your points that made me mad

Even if you need to send in your Dugtrio-weak breaker to kill/revenge a mon, the situation is analogous to clicking specs Draco Meteor on Latios, killing a pokemon, then having Ttar or a boosting sweeper come in. You temporarily lose momentum by making certain moves or killing pokemon as the opponent can make the optimal switch.

This is not the best example, yea by giving ttar a free turn u lose momentum but its not the same as losing a mon, u dont just lose momentum by losing your breaker/wincon, it makes u lose games. whereas you dont auto lose to a boosted sweeper because theres ways to deal with it

Lets say in an example u have your lele vs a weakened chandelure + fat balance + dug, if you kill their chande your breaker dies to duggy and u lose to the fat balance, and if u dont kill the chande u have to sack a mon to specs shadow ball. Like duggy literally puts u at a disadvantage no matter what play u take and ttar or sweepers dont do that, it forces you to play sub optimally and the thing that makes me most mad is that it rewards the opponent when you kill a mon off their team?? What am i supposed to do? Pack multiple breakers? Shed shell on every attacker?

Dugtrio can be taken advantage of with smart switching

What? How? Theres not "smart switching" when they switch into a lati with eject button into duggy, theres no "smart switching" when they sack a mon so they can just so easily bring it in after and kill u. Thats literally the reason why its being suspected, it takes away any option of smart switching

Is it unfair that the opponent can mindlessly send in Dugtrio and remove a core member of your team? Sure. But it's just as mindless to click Chansey when you see a special attacker or scald user without knockoff.

Mindless =/= broken, but broken can = mindless.
For example lando/chansey are the most braindead pokemon ever but they are not overcentralizing. Also theyre different in the sense that u can switch into pokemon that can take advantage of them whereas with dug theres no switches, theres only death and sadness

 

[Too cute to kill]

This will be short, and potentially prone to be removed, but I would like to raise a point on language perhaps. Hopefully to set some better future precdents.

Robopoke (amongst others) I think has done this thread, but perhaps more broadly the discussion of trapping into the context it needs to be put into. Which is a player base general attitude wherein trapping is not inherently a problem, but is when a threshold is crossed. As one moderator in the OU chat on showdown put it, 'you have to read between the lines' to appreciate that people mean arena trap traps too much rather than that trapping is truly uncompetetive (In most cases, I am sure some may even take issue with spiderweb but assume them the minority). Regardless of how nuanced and pedantic arguments may seem, at some point there will be a formal outline of the reasoning behind the arena trap ban. At this point I would say for the sake of the future it is vital that words are chosen precisely. Is trapping at the percentage that dugtrio does an issue, or is any trapping of the sort that arena trap offers an issue? Gamefreak have already displayed there willingness to expand on both the quanitity of mons with a trapping element, and the methods of trapping (anchor shot and spirit shackle) so I think it more than appropritate that Robopokes words be heeded.

On another seperate issue; as an amateur to the suspect process as a voice rather than an observor I am always reticent to forward an opinion. Smogon often has esoteric terminology and threads often present an intimidating environment for one lacking (vast) competetive experience in the current metagame. Thus, treat this perhaps as a question rather than as a statement with the intent to enhance my understanding. In the showdown OU chat I entered a debate regarding an almost omnipresent statement in that lobby; 'Arena trap has no counterplay'. My position on this issue is that it is far more nuanced than such a simple statement suggests. I had read most posts in this thread, and noted there were inummerable example of counterplay on both the decision making level and the itemisation/move choices level. I made it explicitly clear that I did not think that most forms of counterplay were good or, perhaps to brave the greyest of all words, 'competetive' but I thought that there was reliable and ubtiquitous counterplay (at least on the individual mon level). Shed shell is a terrible item to run, and as counterplay represents a fairly poor indicator of balance to many including myself. However, shed shell can also be equipped to almost any mon without making it a completely redundant mon (meaning things like chansey and nothing less punished than it is by losing its item). This of course is only the most immeadiete form of counterplay to arena trap as many other posters have listed other methods (again, I don't wish to judge the quality of other methods just acknowledge their existence). To me this represented having nearly ubtiquitous counterplay, but counterplay with a huge, oppurtunity cost (comparable perhaps to things like colbur jellicent's use in UU the isolated case of running or not running x item on a mon). In otherwords the statement 'Arena trap has no counterplay' would be wrong and a more fitting statement would be 'Arena trap has no counterplay that is not an excessive and/or uncompetetive contortion of the teambuilding process'.

Given the above therefore, I am rather hoping for two things from this post. First, if someone thinks and is willing to tell me my argument/view of the operational definition of counterplay is either pedantic to an extreme or just bluntly incorrect I would love to hear it. Second, especially after reading robo's post, wondering if even though my definition is pedantic (and also perhaps not the best one), it would also be worth Smogon avoiding the wording 'no counterplay' because of what is missed in a very reductive comment and due to fears of what precedents imprecise language could lead to in future suspects.

(Final note because I don't wish for this to be read as part of my argument. In the OU lobby, I attempted to articulate why I thought using the statement 'Arena trap had no counterplay' or 'Arena trap is the definition of no counterplay' was reductive and incorrect and received a mute for it. I can see no foul language, nor did it seem like trolling from my perspective so the event has provoked me. Perhaps therefore I am posting out of chagrin, however, I do think that lobby discussions on showdown can have an effect on voting behaviour (if only through pressure effects of appearing to oppose a majority opinion, well known in psychology even on experts as those with req's parallel). For this reason, I would love if through this post the debate on that thread could be improved by people asking questions of the size of Arena traps effect and the investment required to counter it rather than just reductive one line arguments).

In the dugtrio suspect, attempts were made to analyse Dugtrio's effect size in high quality matches. I haven't seen this yet in this thread (perhaps because of time constraints) but if anyone is willing to do this data heavy work I think it would be an invaluable asset to this discussion. Pardon me if this is already avaliable elsewhere.

Hopefully I can get some clarity out of this post, to at the very least, improve how informed my position is.

 

[Yeastisbeast]

I'm pretty sure arena trap will be banned anyway, but I thought I'd share my thoughts on my first post on a suspect thread (hope I'm not too stupid); To put it simply, arena trap over-centralises the metagame- teams have to run stuff like shed shell on pex, etc. While preparation has to be done for certain threats a team is weak to, the threats prepared for are varied depending on the team. In contrast, a ridiculous number of Pokémon in OU are trapped by dugtrio, especially with innovations instead of the focus sash set, such a groundium Z and scarf. Dugtrio, which in the original suspect troubled only Pokémon it could outspeed and OH, or (if it comes in after a mon is lost) 2KO outright. Now stall has to worry about groundium Z and offense has to worry about scarf. My final reason for wanting arena trap gone is the uniformity dugtrio has brought to stall. Skarm Chansey was and is a very good stall core in the past but it wasn't essential for stall. Dugtrio is almost required on stall these days, and although it's removal would be a nerf, I think it would be healthier for stall if arena trap was banned- I feel stall should be as varied as offense and arena trap opposes that.

 

[cityscapes]

This is not the best example, yea by giving ttar a free turn u lose momentum but its not the same as losing a mon, u dont just lose momentum by losing your breaker/wincon, it makes u lose games. whereas you dont auto lose to a boosted sweeper because theres ways to deal with it

first of all the reason they said "ttar or a sweeper" is because the implication is that ttar can trap latios with pursuit and then you do lose a mon

secondly, why is it that you automatically have a way to prevent an opposing sweeper from beating you, but the mon that dugtrio traps is automatically your wincon? these situations come off as cherry picked to me

 

[Ming549]

first of all the reason they said "ttar or a sweeper" is because the implication is that ttar can trap latios with pursuit and then you do lose a mon

secondly, why is it that you automatically have a way to prevent an opposing sweeper from beating you, but the mon that dugtrio traps is automatically your wincon? these situations come off as cherry picked to me

You will probably not "always have a mon to beat a sweeper", because as sweepers, their job is to inherently clean up a weakened team so I can agree with this statement. However the second part of the argument is where I would possibly like to clarify. I believe that LordHelix was trying to use stall as a specific example to highlight duggy's ability to reliably trap and kill opposing stall breakers which could be dubbed your opponents "win con" vs stall. Mons such as hoopa, mega mawile, tapu lele, etc. can all consistently be trapped by dugtrio and in the case of it being your only stall breaker, that could potentially lose you the game outright. Also what I think he was trying to communicate with the ttar scenario is the vast amount of pokemon that duggy can trap to a degree of success. Ttar, while also being an effective abuser of pursuit, does not necessarily fit the same role duggy does. Ttar while indeed being extremely powerful is also fairly slow in comparison making it lose out to several offensive mons which duggy could possibly have the ability to trap (Gallade, garchomp, medicham, etc.) thus making it in essence a different type of trapper. Keep in mind though I am not Lord Helix and so this is all conjecture and how I viewed this argument, just thought I'd drop my 2 cents, also I kind of addressed the argument backwards so I apologize if you found this confusing.

 

[LordHelix]

first of all the reason they said "ttar or a sweeper" is because the implication is that ttar can trap latios with pursuit and then you do lose a mon

Fine

secondly, why is it that you automatically have a way to prevent an opposing sweeper from beating you, but the mon that dugtrio traps is automatically your wincon? these situations come off as cherry picked to me

Im not saying you automatically have a way to prevent an opposing sweep all the time, but im saying if a sweeper gets one turn like dragon dance or sd that doesnt mean youll instalose as theres still counterplay like scarfers or tanks that could take a hit

On the other hand what will u do if youre facing stall/fat balance and your only breaker that beats that team gets trapped? Liken celespex core and your onoy answer koko gets trapped by scarf dug for example? Thats it you just already lose because dugtrio traps what was one of the few things thats troubling the core and it ends up impossible to break

You will probably not "always have a mon to beat a sweeper", because as sweepers, their job is to inherently clean up a weakened team so I can agree with this statement. However the second part of the argument is where I would possibly like to clarify. I believe that LordHelix was trying to use stall as a specific example to highlight duggy's ability to reliably trap and kill opposing stall breakers which could be dubbed your opponents "win con" vs stall. Mons such as hoopa, mega mawile, tapu lele, etc. can all consistently be trapped by dugtrio and in the case of it being your only stall breaker, that could potentially lose you the game outright.

Ming puts it at much better words, small thing i wanna this doesnt only apply to stall only, theres also many semi-stall/fat balance cores that rely on duggy to remove the threats that troubles the core (zard y/dug)

Also what I think he was trying to communicate with the ttar scenario is the vast amount of pokemon that duggy can trap to a degree of success. Ttar, while also being an effective abuser of pursuit, does not necessarily fit the same role duggy does.

This^ theyre not really comparable, other than the things they trap, ttar doesnt just come in on half the tier after a sack, and click pursuit (which is a 50/50 to use) and the thing that troubles their team is gone

I will admit that losing lati or a mon weak to ttar can make u lose the game too, but its not comparable to dug which can trap a huge portion of important stall/wallbreakers