Implemented Sand Veil in DPP LC

tazz

tazz

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The issue of Sand Veil has come up perennially in DPP LC, though it could be argued that a real discussion on the topic is almost a decade late. The delay in comparison to upper tiers is for a couple reasons:

1. Hippopotas
Unlike in DPP OU where sand's main setter is a fantastic Pokemon, in DPP LC running Sand Veil forces you into using Hippopotas, a C tier Pokemon at best. It is bad to the extent that if you see a Hippopotas lead, it is almost certain that you're facing Sand Veil cheese as there is no other reason to run it.

2. Snover and Rain
Also unlike DPP OU where Hail and Rain, while runnable, remain niche playstyles present in under 10% of games, Snover and Rain are meta-defining playstyles in DPP LC and are horrible matchups for Sand.

3. Gligar
SD Gligar is by far the best abuser on sand veil cheese teams, but there's one problem: there's an extremely good chance that the other team will have a Gligar too. This can lead to games like this where Sand ends up backfiring on its user, especially because Gligar's main method of damaging other Gligar is Aqua Tail, already an inaccurate move. Sand's other main abuser, Cacnea, is not a very strong Pokemon and is not threatening unless it gets lucky with misses.

Sand Veil teams are effectively a fish pick against opponents who don't often use weather, and not a very good one at that. Because its users are usually running two sub-par Pokemon, Hippopotas and Cacnea, it basically relies on getting lucky to win, even against teams with none of its checks. Still, its luck chances are high enough that its seen use in tournament by players trying to get favorable RNG. There is no question that it's a playstyle that relies on luck, but historically people have considered it not good enough to ban.

The main thing stopping any action (in addition to Sand being relatively rare) is the three Pokemon that would be effectively banned with a Sand Veil restriction: Cacnea, Gible and Sandshrew. None of them are seriously viable outside of sand, but it is still taking away three options in the builder. Sand is becoming more common in tournament, however, often as a cheese pick used against very experienced players. Given its RNG-dependent nature, discussions around banning it have become more serious recently.

I'll leave this discussion thread up for 2 weeks or so. If demand for a vote remains, I'll hold one based on tournament qualification.

Please share any thoughts about Sand Veil here. If you would like to post but do not have permissions, please let me know and I can quote you here.
 
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Most of the points I had have been made already, however one thing id like to touch on is trace porygon. It can trace back opposing gligar's sand veil and then hope to kill it with ice moves without missing too much. This creates games where the best play is to pray you dont miss, an undesirable outcome in my mind.
To illustrate how miniscule the collateral of cacnea, sandshrew and gible is: in all the usage stats I could find for the past 2 years of DPPLC tours, cacnea has not been brought without hippo a single time, sandshrew was brought to exactly one game and lost, and gible was not used at all.
 
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tl;dr: Sand Veil is not worth banning, because it is underpowered.

As the op mentioned, it's not a powerful strategy. I agree with all of the points of the op, and it lays out the arguments on both sides very well, so I don't really have too much to add. I have three points to emphasize (for people less familiar with the tier):
  • DPP LC is a hyper centralized metagame. I personally believe that there's little reason to cut Gligar or Munchlax from any standard team comp, and most nonstandard comps as well. The fact that every team comes preloaded with a Sand Veil user to turn the tables on the sand player means that the extra dodge chance is added to both sides (Munchlax cannot benefit from sand, but often the sand player switches Trace Porygon in on the Gligar and Munchlax is an extremely consistent Porygon counter). It makes those turns a bit noisier, and the sand player generally runs Sub SD which is favorable in the Gligar mirror, but the non-sand player still gets to benefit from dodge chance whenever it hits the field. Additionally, they have multiple other Gligar checks on their team; every opponent will have a Gligar, so a team with a singular Gligar check is inherently a flawed team, so Gligar dodging its way through one hit usually won't result in a swept team.
  • DPP LC is a hyper offensive metagame. The tier is fundamentally an exercise in kill trading. Pokemon are not bulky enough to live multiple attacks and stall, nearly every relevant pokemon can 2hko most other pokemon, often through resists. Neutral attack ohkoes are common. The best pokemon are those that can consistently outspeed and win damage trades, either via outspeeding and killing or by living one hit and killing back. There's a bit more nuance, but the point I'm trying to make is that opting into using a bad mon or two is a bigger issue in DPP LC than it would be in other formats. If your Hippo gets killed before it can get 2 moderate value or 1 high value eq off, you can lose the game off of it because you're behind in a kill race. If your Cacnea gets a Sucker Punch mindgame wrong and dies, you lose off it. Personally I think that builds without Cacnea are potentially stronger since you're only using one bad mon (Porygon is fine, it can trade well), but I prefer using 0 bad mons on my teams so I haven't ever seriously considered using sand.
  • As mentioned in the OP, Rain is very strong.
    I personally think the strongest team style in DPP LC is soft rain, which is a team that uses a standard core of Munchlax, Gligar, [ghost, either Duskull or Gastly], Choice Scarf Chinchou, Rain Dance Mantyke, and a filler 6th slot that can be pretty much anything (often the 6th mon is the lead for the team and can be chosen based on the opponent's tendencies). The reasons why I think this team comp is the best aren't really fit for the scope of this post, but the gist is that it has the broken mons and Scarf Chinchou spamming Surf or Hydro Pump is both very potent and quite easy to set up, and manages to perform very comparably to hard rain without losing to most rain counters. The team also, without trying, has an extremely good matchup into sand.
    Aside from that archetype, dedicated rain tends to dunk on Sand Veil spam, since Hippo gets very stressed. Snover is also very good, performing consistently well into rain (and Gligar) and catching sand as collateral. If there weren't very many strategies that could opt out of rolling the dice vs Sand Veil I'd be more sympathetic to those who call for a ban, but like just play rain more it's broken lol. Sand can't really run all of the abusers and also run counters to the counters, it just gets pretty owned by a well timed Snover switch or Rain Dance use.
Sand takes the game a bit out of the players' hands, but it is still largely in their control. There isn't that much cheese in DPP LC, at least that is good enough to see the light of day in a tournament setting which is the only space DPP LC is played now, so it's not like there are an overwhelming number of threats stressing builders and Sand Veil is the straw breaking the camel's back in an otherwise toxic metagame. If you want to run rain or Snover on 70% of your scout you're free to do so and you'll probably lose a bit more often as people capitalize on that but the counters are otherwise really good pokemon. If you happen to load up into Sand Veil without dedicated counters, you're still fine you just might need to hit some moves. It's just not good enough to be worth banning, the meta already lacks diversity and this is not a pressing issue.
 
Fully agree with Nails, every team is naturally equipped to deal with Sand by using the best Mon, which is Gligar. Most single tournaments in DPP LC are BO3, so the impact of luck from Sand Veil in one game is not high, while in team tours (where battles are BO1) a lose from luck is also not very impactful, since you have other 7-9 slots to comeback.
In my opinion, we shouldn't ever be banning niche strategies that get almost no usage, no matter how much they depend on luck. This one specifically can also backfire by Gligar being present in 99% of DPP LC teams. As already mentioned, Rain and Hail are dominating styles too, with or without Sand in the tier.
 
imo if anything gets tiered here it should be Hippo/Sand Stream. None of Hippo or Sandshrew/Cacnea/Gible are actually viable outside of cheesing.

While this is not necessary anyway and I agree with Nails’ post, at least this would ban 1 mon not 3. And there’s precedent from DPP NU banning Hippo rather than effectively banning Sandslash/Cacturne.
 
I agree with most of the points in this thread, but also agree with Eric that the arguments against the ban do not actually sway me in favour of leaving Sand alone.

The collateral damage for a relatively unused (and in some circles, frowned upon) MU fish team lends itself from the argument made that this team isn't good enough or used enough to ban. In other words, there isn't really anything valuable that would be nuked as collateral to a sand ban.

I acknowledge the counterplay that exists. However, also believe the "diversity" argument counters this. If anything, this archetype's existence means you kind of need to build with it in mind. Even if most teams have Snover or Rain users anyway, it does not mean we should force people to run stuff like that just because they don't want to get MU fished into a ridiculous string of bad luck by sand veil.

The one point that I don't see being discussed enough is that the biggest drawbacks of DPP LC (that isn't part of its identity I mean) are 1) MU fishes and 2) impact of specific RNG elements in shorter games. I think it would be beneficial to remove sand as it is an offender of both of those drawbacks.
 
Would rather we take action on it (Sand Veil) than not. DPP LC isn't a format where you can afford to just miss moves, because in most cases it's going to cause you to lose a mon. You also get silly interactions with Gligar being able to boost and BP into something with the luck of Rng by its side to supplement with sand, as well as that replay posted by tazz. Would prefer not to wait until it's optimized via some sort of trap mon to take action on the ability. It also seems a bit ironic that we're okay with this and evasion/weather abilities being allowed but having the evasion item clause in play.
 
The OP was meant to be more neutral but I'll give my own opinion here. I've said multiple times in the past that sand is bad, as it's inconsistent even when it gets the matchups it fishes for. I'm in complete agreement with Nails on that front.

However, I don't see that as a justification for keeping it in the tier. This is flatly an uncompetitive playstyle - the intent of running it is to take the game out of the players hands as much as possible. Metagame variety is not inherently a good thing if part of that variety is luck-based strategy. Legalizing double team would add a new archetype and hence more variety to the metagame, but it would be toxic variety. That is what Sand Veil teams are.

I find the counterplay points to be completely irrelevant with this in mind. It's great that there are steps in the builder that you can take to lessen your chance of losing to Sand Veil, but why maintain that building pressure for the sake of an archetype seeking to bring the outcome of the game down to RNG?

I'll respond to Nails and Eeveeto's defenses real quick:

Nails said:
If there weren't very many strategies that could opt out of rolling the dice vs Sand Veil I'd be more sympathetic to those who call for a ban, but like just play rain more it's broken lol. Sand can't really run all of the abusers and also run counters to the counters, it just gets pretty owned by a well timed Snover switch or Rain Dance use.
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So as I said before, I don't think the existence of strategies (even plentiful ones) that opt out of risking a loss to Sand Veil is convincing to preserve the archetype. The existence of any even slightly viable archetype that is based on "rolling the dice" is problematic in itself.


Nails said:
If you happen to load up into Sand Veil without dedicated counters, you're still fine you just might need to hit some moves. It's just not good enough to be worth banning, the meta already lacks diversity and this is not a pressing issue.
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For the first sentence: again, why do we want to preserve this possiblity for the sake of an RNG-based archetype? It "not being good enough" and "not being a pressing issue" are related and true to a degree, but I don't think a toxic element of a meta needs to be game-breaking (or even particularly good) for it to be worth removing it. Unless there is significant collateral damage, we're just improving the meta for free.

As for the diversity argument, if we're talking about the archetype itself, I'll point to the earlier point I made about the existence of toxic types of diversity. While banning Sand Veil would involve getting rid of Hippopotas or Sandshrew/Gible/Cacnea, these are Pokemon with near 0 tournament use outside of the archetype. The reason the meta lacks diversity is not from lack of eligible Pokemon, it is centralization around the most viable ones. Banning Sand Veil will change nothing about this.

If you don't particularly care about winning, it's possible to use a huge variety of Pokemon in DPP LC. I'd venture a guess that players already willing to use unviable Pokemon like Gible and Cacnea will still find themselves with plenty of options when scrolling through the Pokemon list on Showdown. DPP OU Froslass at least got real use in tournament; we're talking about unranked Pokemon here.

Eeveeto said:
Fully agree with Nails, every team is naturally equipped to deal with Sand by using the best Mon, which is Gligar. Most single tournaments in DPP LC are BO3, so the impact of luck from Sand Veil in one game is not high, while in team tours (where battles are BO1) a lose from luck is also not very impactful, since you have other 7-9 slots to comeback.
In my opinion, we shouldn't ever be banning niche strategies that get almost no usage, no matter how much they depend on luck. This one specifically can also backfire by Gligar being present in 99% of DPP LC teams. As already mentioned, Rain and Hail are dominating styles too, with or without Sand in the tier.
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I'd first like to mention that not every team uses Gligar, even at the top level. With that out of the way, I don't get these points either: I don't see how the mitigation of luck in the context of a bo3 or team tournament justifies keeping around luck-based playstyles with no redeeming qualities. Couldn't you use that exact logic to argue the preservation of evasion or swagplay? Any impact at all is bad, even if its one slot. If I was a DPP player and my opponent chose to make the game I've prepped for and looked forward to a pure roll of the dice, the opportunity of my teammates to play real games of Pokemon would do little to console me. Personally, I enter tournaments to play Pokemon, not roll the dice.

Bughouse said:
imo if anything gets tiered here it should be Hippo/Sand Stream. None of Hippo or Sandshrew/Cacnea/Gible are actually viable outside of cheesing.

While this is not necessary anyway and I agree with Nails’ post, at least this would ban 1 mon not 3. And there’s precedent from DPP NU banning Hippo rather than effectively banning Sandslash/Cacturne.
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I don't really care about this, so we can add the option in any potential vote. While all of these mons are not good, there are definitely degrees of bad; Hippo could be run in outside of Sand Veil teams without being a complete throw (I might have oversold its badness in the OP), but that is not really true of the other three. Hippo is probably better than the other three combined. I don't really think that the DPP NU comparison is applicable, because from eyeballing the stats it seems like Cacturne and Sandslash were better Pokemon than Hippopotas, and might have had some marginal viability outside of sand. This is not true of their pre-evolutions. Obviously I'm not a DPP NU player, so you can let me know if I'm wrong.
 
I don't think it matters how underpowered it is; it adds zero value and only increases the number of bad games, so we might as well ban it
banning hippo vs banning sand veil isn't really important so I'd be happy with either
 
Answering to Tazz:
Well, I might be in a minority on this, but I like luck based strategy as long as they are niche and represent a high enough opportunity cost.

Sand Veil is on 4 Mons, 1 of them is a top Tier Mon, and 3 niche. Hippo itself is another niche Mon. The opportunity cost here is running a niche Mon + the very high chance of opponent bringing Gligar, which will probably back-fire the Sand user (that apart from the high chance of Rain or Hail nullifying the Strat). Therefore I support Sand Veil staying.
Similar example, Accupressure. Found on very niche Mons, that do not always afford to run it, therefore fine for me.
Confuse Ray in RBY, also on niche Mons, many of which have no slots for it. Fine.

What is not fine for me?
Double Team. Every Mon learns it which means that it doesn't make most bad Mons usable, it makes already good Mons even better.
Swagger. Exactly same thing, you won't be running Electrode in GSC with this Mon, you will be running Swagger + Sub Zapdos, an already top Mon. Therefore, Ban.
The recent SV OU Ban of Kyurem. Freeze is fine, but Kyurem is very good at doing it with Sub + Protect and that on top of being very good even when it doesn't freeze. Therefore, I support Kyurem's Ban but not Articuno's one who can do the same Sub + Protect + Freeze Dry + Pressure set, but is much worse Mon and harder to pull it off.

You don't have to agree with my logic, but it's the one I use to Tier luck elements. I accept losing by luck to a worse player as long as some thinking outside the box is involved instead of using the same Mons again and again.
 
Eeveeto said:
You don't have to agree with my logic, but it's the one I use to Tier luck elements. I accept losing by luck to a worse player as long as some thinking outside the box is involved instead of using the same Mons again and again.
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Do you think choosing from the 4 pokemon that get sand veil is thinking outside the box? It's the simplest team to build because you literally just choose some pokemon to fish for misses and hope you get enough. The rest of the team doesn't really matter, because by bringing bad pokemon you've already opted into only winning by getting crucial misses. When swagger was originally banned from ou, it wasn't because good pokemon were using it, it was because klefki and liepard were using it. Those teams weren't creative because they used klefki and liepard, they were the opposite, just filling in a cookie cutter team and hoping you got lucky.

The reason we don't see top players bringing sand is because it inherently reduces the game down to a coinflip in your opponent's favor. People bring sand because they'd rather flip coins for their 30-40% to win, rather than play the game against a better player where they might not have 40%. Sand has always been a problem, it just is bad enough that whenever we've gotten close to banning it in the past it's happened to die down in usage for a bit. There's just no reason to leave in a teamcomp that's purely based on luck.

Also with respect to other arguments about it being fine because you always have your own gligar vs sand, this logic feels a lot like old swagger arguments, where people said that the fact you got something out of the swagger if you got lucky instead made it "fair" because either side could benefit, ignoring the fact that the problem with sand isn't that it isn't fair, it's that it's uncompetitive. The fact that the playstyle is worse because my gligar also has chances to dodge moves just makes sand games even more luck based.
 
While Sand Veil is without a doubt not a strong strategy, it is entirely uncompetitive. Banking on misses isn't skill based or really a positive influence to the tier no matter how strong or weak it is. Last LCPL proved that people will bring it no matter how "bad" it is.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen4lc-786933
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen4lc-784749

Sure, it's not strong, but why does that matter? It's an uncompetitive strategy that has very little collateral regardless of how tiering is handled and whether Hippo or Sand Veil is banned
 
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Strongly against any action against Hippo. As mentioned earlier in the thread, Rain is one of the stronger styles in DPP LC, and removing a way to remove rain from the battlefield (as well as bulk and immediately threaten some of the more common rain abusers like Kabuto and Omanyte) should not be done. Additionally, Hippo itself is a decent enough pokemon, getting value from being a rock setter and bulky physical wall. If tiering action happens it should be towards sand veil; the sand veil abusers that would be banned have little to no impact on the meta without sand, and this meta is already one of the most diverse on the site.

As for sand veil itself, much more ambivalent personally. Its a cheese strategy but one that does not land quite as often as I think this thread would have you believe imo. If the consensus is to ban it I would not be sad to see it go though.
 
Bughouse said:
imo if anything gets tiered here it should be Hippo/Sand Stream. None of Hippo or Sandshrew/Cacnea/Gible are actually viable outside of cheesing.

While this is not necessary anyway and I agree with Nails’ post, at least this would ban 1 mon not 3. And there’s precedent from DPP NU banning Hippo rather than effectively banning Sandslash/Cacturne.
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The more I think about it, the more prone I am to say ban Sand Veil instead. This is the path a good chunk of tiers take to avoid collateral damage, including tiers where it makes pokemon unusable. While more pokemon do become do become unusable in the tier, Quality vs Quantity is something that has to be considered. Hippopotas isn't anywhere near as good as Ttar and Hippowdon in their respective tiers, but even without sand veil it is also more valuable to the tier as a weather setting bulky rocker/ground type than anything Cacnea, Sandshrew, and Gible can dp. These are pokemon that would never see any serious play. DPP NU is a little different, as Hippopotas is essentially dedicating a slot to an almost worthless pokemon just to set sand for Veil users to abuse, whereas it has actual applications outside of forcing misses in this tier.
 
The one and only thing I agree about with the Ban side is that under no circumstance Hippopotas should be banned. By itself it has no crimes in the historial and provides legit strategies like the Sdef increase of Shieldon, Anorith, Lileep and other Rock Mons.
If something has to be banned (in my opinion nothing should), Sand Veil has a stronger case.

Ban Diglett or Arena Trap in every LC Tier btw.
 
I am on holiday on phone so I will keep this short.

My main point would be around that Gligar really wants to run hyper cutter to be the answer to memento screens that it is meant to be, but now people have to run the worse, fringe case ability to not lose to sand cheese. Add to that that rain is always an inch from seeing action taken. This is just a plain and simple net positive for the format without any discernable downside that keeps games honest, and really should just be part of the evasion clause. There is also a recent precedent set in DPP ou, with p much the exact same scenario. Froslass was the one with action taken against it for a degenerate play pattern against the grain of weather in the tier simply because it sometimes fished really damn well. Unmons got hit by that too. But in this case the mon really seeing action in Gligar has an even better ability to use anyway.

To the why take action on something bad argument. I don't think that is neither here nor there. Most teams shouldn't have obvious counter play and Aerial Ace is only good on very specific structures. Hippo is also positive for the metagame enabling fringe tactics that are better than veil spam like in the case of mons that have some amount of pedigree and usage like lileep, Aron, and shieldon.

I may post more but I am literally walking to a cafe.
 
I am not sure Sand Veil is worth a suspect, as it's a barely-used, barely-functional cheese. However, now that this topic is open, I do think there is no good reason to keep it as various people on this thread have already discussed.

On acting on Hippo against acting on Sand Veil, I think Hippo is the ideal target.
I am not sure why we are trying to save Hippopotas - it is actually horrible. Cacnea, Sandshrew and Gible might be worse, but all 4 are a such a low level of power that I would rather keep as many pokemons as possible. Gligar is the sole reason Sand Veil is a good ability, and if it didn't have another ability, I think everyone would agree that saving Gligar would be more important. I'm unsure why three awful mons have to pay the price for Gligar being so good and Hippopotas enabling Gligar, despite it being laughably bad as well.
 
just wanna say that even tho hippo itself is pretty bad and its removal wouldnt impact much, the fundamental issue is sand veil. sand veil cheese would still exist on paper with hippo removed since the door is still open for someone to run dogwater ass manual sand smooth rock bs. of course this is an absolute reach, and the sand veil-only mons themselves are really bad, so i wouldnt really mind either way if either hippo or sand veil are gone, but getting rid of sand veil removes the option of cheese entirely.
 
I apologize for the delay, this semester has been pretty insane work-wise.

We will move be moving forward with a vote on this before the next major LC team tournament. Going along with the general trend in the thread and some discord discussions, as well as to be consistent with other tiers, we will be suspecting sand veil rather than Hippopotas. This matches DPP OU's ban list, and realistically Hippopotas is more viable than the 3 sand veil users combined. We will also be voting on Snow Cloak, making this a general evasion abilities suspect. This will not result in any Pokemon being effectively banned, as its only user (Swinub) has another ability.

I am drawing the voting list from the top 16 of the most recent DPP LC cup circuit tournament, and all of the team tours this year (DPPPL, LCWC, LCPL, anyone with more than 1 win).

ninjadog
Lialiabeast
Valerie
tazz
Imanalt
MOHAMEDALL
Corckscrew
Voltix
Quinn
LilyAC
Chaos23333
Stecolomaxx
Nudisto
Kebab mlml
Kaboom
LeJames Chonk
Nineveh
Brammi
TyCarter
Fantos13
Kipkluif
Nails
HSOWA
SEA
Heysup
Melon
Beraldo
Eeveeto
Finchinator
Mendeez
gorex
Alkione
Hacker
skrimps
goldmason

Vote will go up shortly
 
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Posting on behalf of LC staff

Out of 35 possible votes, 21 of them have voted ban. Even if everyone who currently has not voted voted Do Not Ban, it would still reach 60% of people voting to ban. Therefore, Snow Cloak and Sand Veil should both be banned from DPP LC.

We will leave the vote open for 48 more hours to allow people who have not voted yet to have a chance to vote for TC.
Kebab mlml Beraldo Mendeez Stecolomaxx gorex Nudisto

Tagging dhelmise to implement. Thanks in advance!
 
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