Going to what Poirepi is saying
There is a reason broken shit gets banned. Take Dracovish for example, it OHKOd neutral targets and 2HKOd/OHKOd resists, especially in rain. Nothing can take a banded Fisheous Rend except for Seismitoad and other water absorb/storm drain pokemon. So people gravitated towards Toad for that reason and also rocks + knock. The problem wasn’t that Vish didn’t have any notable counters, its the fact that every team had to run the same Clef/Corv/Toad team to not get steamrolled by Vish. It lead to a very stale and restricting metagame.
Alot of people claim banning mons leads to a stale meta when it leads to the opposite. Less restriction means more freedom in the builder. This is why people think ADV is one of the best competitive gens. While it is centralized around sand + spikes, most of that gen’s OU threats are either immune to one or the other, or both. You can find creative sets and even creative choices in the builder like Camerupt which is meant to act as a check to Zapdos and a breaker, or Hariyama and it being the best user of Knock in a game where 90% of the tier relies on lefties to stay healthy.
This is also why alot of people hate BW OU. Because we didn’t ban the broken things flying around, everyone has to either run Sand or run the broken stuff themselves, but that is a topic for another day.
So yes, banning unhealthy threats leads to a more diverse metagame. Agree or disagree but that is the way it is. Also don’t disregard Ubers as a tier, it is a widely popular tier (especially in DPP and BW). It is an option.
Thank you for your answer.
I do however disagree on some points :
- When one pokemon is overcentralizing, it is absolutely normal to ban it ; Dracovish was clearly broken. However, it took some weeks before we could really say, for sure, that it was banworthy.
- In the current gen, "many" pokemons are currently considered "broken" ; but is this a natural evolution of the game (which I think), or an effort on Smogon part to keep a metagame we are so used to removable ? What I mean, is that if there are many "broken" mons, it's maybe because we are currently facing a massive powercreep. In this regard, I think we'd better take it for what it is, and test "truly" broken mons, instead of trying to level the metagme down to what we consider "balance".
- In gen 8, this wasn't an issue at all, since, except for Dracovish, Urshifu S and GDarm (and maybe Melmetal), the new mons weren't as strong as they currently are.
- Moreover, we have to take into account the new mechanic of this Gen. Contrary to Dynamax, which was clearly too overcentralizing and unfit to a 6v6 format (and yet, I keep thinking that we should have dove more into it before banning it), Terastalization seems a bit more "balanced" or less centralizing. In this regard, it redefines the shape of our expectations of what a metagame should look like. I'm pretty sure that Flutter Mane would have had many counters thanks to Tera, had we given it more time.
As for Ubers, I already stated my point : it's not a tier until we actually have more than 2 "real" uber mons. No one was really playing ubers in gen 8 before Pokemon Home came. And moreover, we know that OU banned mons never really shine in the tier.