np: ORAS UU Stage 8 - I Got the Keys [Klefki is unbanned, see post 25]

Ok this is obviously very late but hear me out, I've been rather busy.

I had a discussion with hogg about the results of the suspect, and his opinions kind of surprised me. He said that even though Klefki has an incredible typing that allows it to soft check virtually all of hyper and bulky offenses biggest problem mons while also easing the late game with spikes and stopping threats with prankster thunder wave, it remained balanced and healthy in his eyes. The biggest area of concern for me is that all of Klefki's merits combined leads to it being an incredibly splashable mon for offensive teams.
The biggest argument that I had seen for Klefki being healthy was that it's poor matchup against the majority of the tiers hazard removers meant that it tended to do its job poorly. As far as I'm concerned however, this problem doesn't really apply to Klefki when you consider it's usefulness on a team. Klefki is coming in on pokemon that have traditionally been massive problems for offensive playstyles, like Scarf Hydreigon, Sceptile, Crobat, and Beedrill and using their inability to beat it in order to support its team. In this sort of situation the Klefki user is winning in two ways. He is both preventing these fast attackers from running through the rest of his team, and he is incapacitating a switchin with thunder wave or supporting the rest of his team with spikes. Klefki is doing something beneficial for it's team every single time it comes in, regardless of the tentacruel, empoleon, or forretress switchin.
This is the reason that Klefki is incredibly overbearing for the tier in my opinion. You're taking a mon that is already splashable by virtue of it's typing, and you are giving it the ability to maintain momentum by doing something to support the team almost every single turn. Klefki just has too many things going for it and not enough to actually inhibit it's success to be healthy for the tier.
I loved ORAS UU. It's been such a fun experience especially with friends to share it with. However, looking back at the ride doesn't change the fact that this train has been pretty much run into the ground by stuff like Klefki. I don't think it's an uncommon opinion that ORAS has become much less fun to play given this awkward power balance we have going on. I'm not saying this is anyone's fault, especially not our TL's and council. They're all smart people who in my opinion have made mostly good decisions as a group. If anything, this situation was a product of the pokemon in it. In generation 7 it is entirely likely that we will be faced with a similar situation to ORAS. So my question to you all is how to deal with it. I don't know, and almost certainly no one really knows how we could have stopped this unhealthy power balance other than just "ban 'em all", which obviously could have just resulted in a worse situation. A better metagame next gen is only gonna come around if we talk about this more as a community and figure out the objective state of the metagame and get to the root of the problem.
 

Meru

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Funny how mons often get banned by supermajorities (twice for keys) and then randomly later are unbanned by supermajorities

The meta must just change so drastically! hahaha.
You do realize keys got banned with all the other ORAS fairies? So yes the meta actually was drastically different .. ?

Ok this is obviously very late but hear me out, I've been rather busy.

I had a discussion with hogg about the results of the suspect, and his opinions kind of surprised me. He said that even though Klefki has an incredible typing that allows it to soft check virtually all of hyper and bulky offenses biggest problem mons while also easing the late game with spikes and stopping threats with prankster thunder wave, it remained balanced and healthy in his eyes. The biggest area of concern for me is that all of Klefki's merits combined leads to it being an incredibly splashable mon for offensive teams.
The biggest argument that I had seen for Klefki being healthy was that it's poor matchup against the majority of the tiers hazard removers meant that it tended to do its job poorly. As far as I'm concerned however, this problem doesn't really apply to Klefki when you consider it's usefulness on a team. Klefki is coming in on pokemon that have traditionally been massive problems for offensive playstyles, like Scarf Hydreigon, Sceptile, Crobat, and Beedrill and using their inability to beat it in order to support its team. In this sort of situation the Klefki user is winning in two ways. He is both preventing these fast attackers from running through the rest of his team, and he is incapacitating a switchin with thunder wave or supporting the rest of his team with spikes. Klefki is doing something beneficial for it's team every single time it comes in, regardless of the tentacruel, empoleon, or forretress switchin.
This is the reason that Klefki is incredibly overbearing for the tier in my opinion. You're taking a mon that is already splashable by virtue of it's typing, and you are giving it the ability to maintain momentum by doing something to support the team almost every single turn. Klefki just has too many things going for it and not enough to actually inhibit it's success to be healthy for the tier.
I loved ORAS UU. It's been such a fun experience especially with friends to share it with. However, looking back at the ride doesn't change the fact that this train has been pretty much run into the ground by stuff like Klefki. I don't think it's an uncommon opinion that ORAS has become much less fun to play given this awkward power balance we have going on. I'm not saying this is anyone's fault, especially not our TL's and council. They're all smart people who in my opinion have made mostly good decisions as a group. If anything, this situation was a product of the pokemon in it. In generation 7 it is entirely likely that we will be faced with a similar situation to ORAS. So my question to you all is how to deal with it. I don't know, and almost certainly no one really knows how we could have stopped this unhealthy power balance other than just "ban 'em all", which obviously could have just resulted in a worse situation. A better metagame next gen is only gonna come around if we talk about this more as a community and figure out the objective state of the metagame and get to the root of the problem.
You can't really say Klefki is too good just because it's "always doing something". There are mons like Rotom-W and mega bee that are virtually guaranteed to bring momentum using their support and pivot moves but that doesn't immediately make them broken since they can still only use one move per turn. Fires, Electrics, and Grounds come in a variety of wall breakers and all of them can pretty much all switch in for free and momentum is lost in exchange for a layer of Spikes which sometimes isn't worth it so instead of looking in a vacuum what Klefki accomplishes in a single turn I think it's more worthwhile to look at the tools that offense has to keep momentum, of which there are plenty
 

rs

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Not that it matters now, but just curious. Was there reasons written somewhere as to why each person voted what they voted? No member actually posted their thoughts before the vote (post-ladder implementation) at all in this thread except for Hogg's on Fairy Lock. Myself and a lot of other UUers didn't really expect Klefki to get unbanned this late into ORAS, much less for the vote to actually be unanimous, so you can expect that we'd be at least a little surprised. But yeah, as far as a council vote goes maybe some communication/reasoning would've been nice ._.
 
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Hogg

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Myself and a lot of other UUers didn't really expect Klefki to get unbanned this late into ORAS
For what it's worth, Klefki probably would have been suspected far earlier if it wasn't OU by usage for so long. Klefki's ban was a very early decision from a time when both the meta and the general tiering philosophy in UU were different. This last minute unban had more to do with the fact that its usage only recently dropped low enough to be considered UU. As for why there was no real discussion, honestly I was fairly surprised by that myself - though in my case, I'm referring to the lack of responses overall rather than specifically from the council. I know that every single one of us reads this thread regularly, and there was almost zero input from the community regarding how they felt about Klefki. Oddly enough, the Baton Pass issue generated WAY more discussion, despite being a much "smaller" ban overall (at least in terms of the number of teams it impacts). I know that personally to me it seemed like the community largely didn't care about this suspect.

As for my thoughts on Klefki, I feel like Meru captured them fairly well. I can write up a bit more later though, if people want more details. The short and sweet of it is that while some aspects of Klefki are certainly annoying, none of them actually came across as unbalanced in any of my testing, either when using or facing Klefki. While I was a bit skeptical at first of introducing a super-reliable Spiker into the tier, the fact that it matches up so poorly against almost every hazard clearer in the tier meant that spikestack teams often had to dedicate multiple teamslots to keeping their hazards up, which mitigated many of Klefki's advantages. It's a good 'mon, and will find use on a lot of teams, but I personally never found it crossing the line into unhealthy in this metagame.
 

Kink

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My thoughts mirror those that have been stated insofar that adding Klefki actually doesn't do anything to make this tier worse, and true to my conservative nature I don't make half-choices. If something is obviously broken in my opinion, then I vote ban. If it isn't, I don't vote ban. My voting history supports this and it was the same thing this time.

If any of you are looking for actual paragraph long reason as to why Klefki is alright, just know this... If you run Klefki, you're not running Sylveon. If you run both, you open up a huge hole. Prankster is not good enough since Klefki's checks and counter in the form of hazard control (Tentacruel, Empoleon, Forry, Crobat) can handle it decently, only fearing T-wave. Klefki will be a versatile option for those trying to get away from the Sylveon model of building, and that's a good thing.

If Klefki is broken, it's not broken now. Maybe it will be later, and I'll be happy to look at it later as Gen 7 forms, or even if the Gen 6 meta shifts to the point where Klefki is a problem (it happened twice before), so we shall see. This is consistent with my voting philosophy. For now, I actually think it adds components to the metagame which allows us to move away from the norm. And let's be honest, the norm was getting bad.
 
I'm currently messing around with Klefki SpikeStall, and so far it's very promising. It's ability to hard switch on all Sylveons and ability to set up on some of the most common Pokemon in the tier via Magnet Rise (Mamo, Krook, Swampert) accelerates hazard stacking and causes p-hazing a la Magnet Rise.
 

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