A Documentary on Dracovish: From Rags to Fishious
From ladder gimmick to top tier threat; what happened to Dracovish, and should it be banned?
Dracovish is a new fossil Pokémon in Generation 8. It is a Water- and Dragon-type with aggressively mediocre stats. Just looking at its stats, it looks pretty awful, essentially a downgrade to Kingdra of all things. This surface level analysis doesn't tell the whole story, however. Dracovish was given a signature Water-type attack called Fishious Rend. Fishious Rend is an 85 base power physical attack that doubles in power when Dracovish moves first. a 170 base power move with STAB would already hit like a truck on its own, but that's not all. Fishious Rend is categorized as a biting attack, which means the move gets another 1.5x boost from Dracovish's Strong Jaw ability. Being a Water-type attack also gives it access to Rain's 1.5x boost to all Water-type attacks. This is without even considering its item slot, which is commonly filled by Mystic Water or Choice Band, granting another 1.2x or 1.5x boost respectively. Dracovish's low stats on the surface are more than made up for by its signature move essentially being a ball of multipliers, with the only caveat being needing to move first.
In order to truly conceptualize the sheer power of this move, we also need to understand how multipliers in Pokémon work. Multipliers from different sources are counted as multiplicative, not additive. the boost from Strong Jaw and Rain combined is not 2x like you might originally think, it's actually 2.25x. This may seem like a small difference when just considering these two multipliers on their own, but the difference between multiplicative and additive boosts becomes larger the more sources of damage augmentation are added. When factoring in this distinction, this gives Fishious Rend a final base power of 573.75
without considering Dracovish's item slot. This absurd base power essentially removes Dracovish's need for coverage, as even against resists the move still boasts 286.875 base power. To put this into perspective, in order for any coverage move to be worth using for a Strong Jaw Dracovish, it would need a base power of 144 or higher AND super-effective to be worth using over a max power Fishious Rend.
Dracovish in Early SS
Now considering how I just spent 350 words telling you how broken Dracovish's signature move is, you may be surprised to hear it wasn't actually considered very good for a long time. People generally considered Dracovish pretty niche. Dracovish's need to go first makes it best paired with fast Tailwind setters. Early on, it was commonly paired with Whimsicott to have the fastest possible Tailwind in the tier. There were a few problems with this strategy at the time.
Firstly, Whimsicott teams weren't as optimized back then as they are now. People typically ran Whimsicott with Tailwind, Protect, Moonblast and Taunt. Developments like Fake Tears, Encore and Cotton Spore that gave Whimsicott more utility and pressure weren't really a thing yet. Whimsicott teams with Dracovish lacked dimension due to Whimsicott's passivity and lack of much utility outside of Tailwind. Using Whimsicott with these unoptimized movesets essentially felt like playing down a Pokémon once you got Tailwind up. Dracovish also isn't really that fast by this tier's standards if the enemy team is able to match or stagger Tailwinds against it, and because many Dracovish Whimsicott teams at the time relied on Dracovish as the main source of damage, this was a huge issue. Even running Choice Scarf on Dracovish over the more common Choice Band at the time didn't fully solve the issue, as it was still outsped by other common scarfers at the time like Genesect and Landorus-T.
Even against teams that couldn't directly outspeed Dracovish, it wasn't out of the woods yet. SS is a tier with a lot of priority. Teams in this tier typically have high Fake Out and Grassy Glide usage. Priority moves cause the user to always move before Dracovish, essentially halving its damage output while taking sizeable chunks of damage from Grassy Glide. This was also before Amoonguss usage fell off, and Rage Powder would not only half Dracovish's damage output into Amoonguss, but Amoonguss also resists Fishious Rend, effectively quartering its damage. Granted Dracovish's damage is still non-negligible even with a quarter of its base power, but Amoonguss and other redirection users like Blastoise still did more than enough to make the matchup manageable.
There were also just better Water-types in the tier. For a long time, people considered Urshifu-Rapid-Strike to be the premier offensive Water-type in the tier and saw it as better than Dracovish. Sure, it didn't have Dracovish's damage output, but its ability to ignore Intimidate with Surging Strikes, strong secondary STAB with Close Combat and better coverage moves for the meta made it the more flexible and overall better option.
The last obstacle to Dracovish's success was the perception of it in the DOU community as a gimmick and where that comes from. DOU is not a very popular format even within the competitive Pokémon community, so when new players to competitive Pokémon are looking for doubles content, they usually come across content made for VGC formats. Most people using Dracovish at the time weren't top players trying out a new playstyle, but newer players who copied VGC teams with Dracovish and used them in DOU for whatever reason. Because these teams were usually made for content, they weren't very good, and neither were the players piloting them. This led to the perception of Dracovish being mainly as a gimmick rather than something to seriously consider trying out. Dracovish was already hard to make work even for good players due to how prediction reliant Dracovish teams often are, but seeing so many newer players with less game sense piloting these teams made it seem much worse than it had the potential to be.
Dracovish in Modern SS
The perception of Dracovish as a ladder gimmick wouldn't change until very recently. Dracovish is now considered one of the most potent offensive threats in the tier and a potential target for a suspect test in the future. Almost all of the problems with Dracovish in earlier metas are either nonexistent or able to be worked around with more optimal teambuilding.

Tyranitar hazard stack teams were popularized by Nails during SCL II, and were found to synergize pretty well with Dracovish. Sand Rush Dracovish does less damage than a Strong Jaw set, but allows it to get around its weakness of having low Speed when Tailwind is matched by the enemy team by having two sources of Speed boosting rather than just one. The hazard stacking mode of the team combined with Sand chip also did more than enough to break down the enemy team for Dracovish to clean late game. Dracovish found a solid niche on these teams, but Sand Rush sets aren't really considered unhealthy. Sand Rush basically forces Dracovish to run Choice Band to make up for the damage lost from Strong Jaw, which can be exploited with strong positional play. Sand teams also did very little to help Dracovish with its weakness to priority. Dracovish did so much damage despite these downsides that it was still worth running, but is still the most balanced and honest way to run Dracovish.
Whimsicott had a similar redemption arc in the tier due to players realizing how powerful dynamic speed is. In Generation 8, changes to turn order through field conditions like Tailwind were made to take effect immediately. In previous generations, bulky Tailwind setters like Suicune were viable due to the lack of dynamic speed, because regardless of how fast a Tailwind setter is, the speed change will still not take effect until the next turn. In dynamic speed metas, having a faster Tailwind than your opponent becomes more valuable than bulk. Players originally defaulted to Naganadel as the premier fast Tailwind setter in the tier due to its high damage output, but Whimsicott Offense teams would soon develop.
The idea behind these teams is the same as it's always been. Whimsicott has the fastest possible Tailwind in the tier, and with dynamic speed this allows you to overwhelm slower Tailwind setters with immediate speed and damage. Whimsicott's pitiful base stats and passivity were still issues for these kinds of structures, so Whimsicott adopted bulkier, utility focused sets. Encore exerted massive pressure against slow Balance teams that would otherwise slow down the progress of these offensive structures with moves like Fake Out and Protect. Encore allows Whimsicott to exploit these passive plays and force switches, pressure that it was never able to access with older movesets. Fake Tears when paired with strong special attackers like Choice Specs Tapu Fini and Landorus also gave Whimsicott teams insane single target damage pressure to make the most out of the limited Tailwind turns you have. Now that Whimsicott's sets are much more focused on utility rather than attacking, running more bulk is also an option. Whimsicott's stats aren't good by any stretch, but by fully investing in Whimsicott's bulk you can afford to like at least one big hit before going down, which frees up Whimsicott's item slot to run Sitrus Berry or Eject Button.
Hold on a second. Remember the Whimsicott + Dracovish core we talked about earlier? Now that Whimsicott teams were more optimized and independently good teams without Dracovish, what happens if we add Dracovish's insane damage output and inherent synergy with the archetype back in?
And thus Dracovish Offense was born. Dracovish teams now had more dimension due to being paired with a Fake Tears offense mode that can break through most things that Dracovish struggles with while Dracovish still gets to benefit from Whimsicott's immediate Tailwind and Encore pressure. Running Dracovish over Tapu Fini here also gets rid of any positional awkwardness with Misty Terrain potentially lowering the damage output of Naganadel's Draco Meteor. Dracovish's synergy with Whimsicott is still amazing, with Dracovish loving the dynamic speed changes and Fishious Rend's insane damage output forcing passive plays like switches, Fake Outs and Protects that can be exploited by Whimsicott's Encore pressure. On top of the synergy here being top-notch, Dracovish still deals a LOT of damage. On these teams Dracovish can run Strong Jaw due to no longer needing Sand Rush, which boosts its damage output a ton. It's damage is so absurd to the point of being able to consistently 2hko bulky resists. Its damage output combined with defensive plays into Whimsicott being inherently risky make Dracovish incredibly difficult to answer defensively, with the easiest way to combat this synergy being to check it offensively with an opposing Prankster Tailwind to exploit Dracovish's low base Speed.
This is Stax Rain. This specific archetype of Rain combines the immediate speed and power of Choice Specs Zapdos and Kingdra with a Trick Room mode with Thunder Porygon2 and Iron Defense Ferrothorn to combat faster Whimsicott teams. All of this tied together with Tsareena blocking priority and access to Feint allowing both modes of the team to safely and consistently get their attacks off gives you a potent offense team with the ability to slow down the pace of games when needed with a solid defensive Trick Room mode.

Fitting Dracovish on Rain was an interesting prospect. Typically, if you wanted to use Dracovish with any weather it was Sand, but Rain would boost its damage output to the point of even being able to OHKO resists, while Tsareena blocks any attempts at using priority or Protect to slow it down.
Conveniently, Rain also has a pretty solid Priority Tailwind option with Tornadus. Tornadus not only gave Dracovish the Prankster Tailwind it loves being paired with but was capable of doing good damage itself with Life Orb Hurricane and being able to Taunt most other Whimsicott to deny Tailwind, as most no longer ran max Speed. Dracovish's damage output was ABSURD on these teams, and the combination of Tornadus and Tsareena made playing around Dracovish defensively with priority, Protects or bulky resists near impossible. These teams to rely on Dracovish for a large portion of their damage, but Dracovish does so much damage already that it's incredibly difficult to stop a well-played Dracovish from taking more than one KO. Politoed also has the option of running Helping Hand to remove any pokemon that were able to tank a Fishious Rend, but doing so is often overkill as Dracovish does so much damage anything that isnt an immunity or 4x resist is either dying or taking upwards of 80%. Rain teams boost Dracovish's damage output to truly unhealthy degrees and Tsareena denies the main existing counterplay to Dracovish with Queenly Majesty and Feint. Even the one viable immunity to Dracovish in Volcanion can't really threaten much damage back, allowing Dracovish to just target its partner slot and take KOs while the Volcanion watches its friends die.
Is Dracovish Too Good?
Short answer? Yes. To give a bit more of a long-winded answer to this question, most problems caused by Dracovish stem from one simple fact: It just does too much damage.
Let's talk about Landorus. In my opinion, Landorus is the damage ceiling of the tier. This may sound stupid to say on the surface, as multiple Pokemon in the tier do more damage than Landorus, but most of those Pokemon have some sort of major drawback or caveat to dealing that amount of damage, whereas Landorus requires basically no support and does its damage basically regardless of what team you put it on. For example, Modest Naganadel hits harder than Landorus can in a single hit with Draco Meteor, but it can only do this damage once per switch-in and is significantly weaker the second use. Pheromosa can do more damage than Landorus, but it's incredibly frail and typically needs to be paired with some form of priority blocking. Choice Band Genesect does more damage than Landorus, but only with a Download boost which it won't always get. I can keep going but I think you get my point. If something is doing significantly more damage than Landorus on a neutral target (given reasonable assumptions) without a super meaningful drawback, it generally indicates to me that there's something wrong with the power balance in the tier. This is a BURNED Dracovish Fishious Rend compared to Landorus Earth Power:
252 SpA Life Orb Sheer Force Landorus Earth Power vs. 252 HP / 0 SpD Mew: 230-270 (56.9 - 66.8%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
252+ Atk Mystic Water Strong Jaw burned Dracovish Fishious Rend (170 BP) vs. 252 HP / 4 Def Mew: 212-249 (52.4 - 61.6%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
I think this is, for lack of a better term, a little bit silly. Taking a peek behind the curtain for a second, I've gone to great lengths to try to make sure all of my calcs for Dracovish are fair assumptions for its average damage output as to not paint a disingenuous picture of Dracovish's damage output. Being too generous with my assumptions for damage calculations is something I've done in the past and will try my best not to do in the future. That being said, I think this is MORE than a charitable assumption for Dracovish's damage. I'm not assuming a Rain team for Dracovish, I'm giving it a Mystic Water for these calculations which is a weaker boosting item than Choice Band, and this specific calculation is a BURNED Dracovish. If anything, Dracovish will be doing significantly more damage than this in an average game, and it's STILL doing barely less damage than Landorus Earth Power.
The reason I'm using a burned Dracovish specifically is because a lot of different things can half its damage output. Hitting into a resist, moving second, and burns all cut its damage output in half, and it's still doing competitive damage with some of the best damage dealers in the tier on neutral targets. In order to get Dracovish's damage output to a reasonable level here you would need to stack MULTIPLE of these multipliers together, like using Amoonguss' Rage Powder to both make Dracovish move second and hit a resist or use Will-O-Wisp Volcanion to burn Dracovish and then try to tank its hits with bulky resists. In my opinion, this is an unreasonable amount of defensive counterplay to deal with one Pokémon considering Dracovish still has teammates that you'll also need to be able to beat, and can stack additional multipliers onto itself in the form of Rain, stronger boosting items and Helping Hand (none of which are really unfair assumptions in my opinion but I won't use these in any calculations unless its relevant).
If you've heard me talk about Dracovish before you've probably heard me joke that if you're not bringing Tyranitar or Whimsicott you autolose to Dracovish Rain. While this is a bit of an oversimplification there is some truth to it. There's two main ways to counter Dracovish. You can either concede in your teambuilding that it would take too many resources to survive its attacks defensively, and use opposing Whimsicott offense to exploit its low base speed and beat it offensively. The other is to take away as many of its multipliers as possible, with things like removing Rain boosts with your own weather, Intimidate, Will-O-Wisp and bulky resists like Tapu Fini and Rillaboom. Both of these methods have been proven to work as counterplay, but I would like to be able to use teams that are not Nails Hazard Stack or Whimsicott Offense personally.
There are also more niche counters to Dracovish like Scarf Naganadel and Amoonguss, so saying that you HAVE to bring Tyranitar or Whimsicott isn't entirely true, but expecting players to fit these niche counters onto every team they build feels a little unreasonable to me. Scarf Naganadel is not something you can just slap on a team and have it perform well, and Amoonguss introduces teambuilding instabilities (Fitting a Ground resist becomes difficult, Psyspam matchup can become hard due not being able to run Rillaboom without typestacking, etc.) that can be exploited not only by other popular teams, but by Dracovish's already existing teammates.
Without being too granular in my analysis, the short of it is I think Dracovish is too demanding to counter defensively and forces too many teambuilding restrictions to be healthy. It creates a sort of less pronounced version of the problems Kartana created. Kartana was broken because its unique set of traits forced enemy teams to either conform to offensive Tailwind wars or run pretty terrible Pokémon like Buzzwole and Togekiss to have a good matchup into it. Dracovish is (in my opinion) broken because its damage output is so absurd it becomes nearly impossible to defensively answer a well-played Dracovish, forcing enemy teams to either conform to offensive Tailwind wars or run pretty terrible Pokémon in current SS like Amoonguss and AV Kyurem-B to have a good matchup into it. I don't think Dracovish is as extreme as Kartana yet, but I still think its unhealthy even in its current state and would rather not have something like it in the tier.
I would support a Dracovish suspect and would vote
ban.