With the conclusion of SPL, the VR update a few months ago, as well as the ORAS representation in all sorts of unofficial tournaments, I wanted to review my VR from last year and update it. Here’s my new list, I’ll talk about some changes at the bottom.
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The first major change is that I am no longer rating
Tornadus as a pure S-Tier Pokemon. This sounds more drastic than it is, as it’s still comfortably top 5 in the tier, but the popularity spike of Zapdos and (to lesser extent) the Thundurus formes definitely hurts Tornadus to the point where I can’t confidently put it as number 1 where I had it ranked last year. I didn’t change
Zapdos’ ranking as I had already rated it fairly high and the usage increase is clearly just a result of that
.
I moved Serperior up a tier and dropped Diancie down a tier.
Serperior still is one of the biggest threats in the metagame and it is not going to go anywhere. I don’t have a specific reasoning as to why it moves up aside from that it feels correct to put it there which wasn’t the case last year. I dropped
Diancie a bit because I do feel that it has gotten slightly harder for it to be as massive of a threat as it was. Pokémon like Amoonguss Gastrodon and Chansey are all increasing in usage (and viability) and Diancie just kind of suffers as a result. A mega evolution like
Alakazam is simply in a better spot in the current meta, benefiting from Tornadus sets changing in favor of Helmet > AV a lot of the time, as well as being able to deal with would-be checks via combinations of Calm Mind, Taunt, Encore or Recover.
A big one is
Gallade moving all the way up to A tier. This is a Pokémon that I was personally quite sceptical about pre SPL, but have since become a fan of. Massively threatening to almost any Team and it is able to boost on a LOT of Pokémon that you wouldn’t expect to be able to beat if you’re unfamiliar with the calcs. This Pokémon has also caused the drop of
Medicham as there are a lot of scenarios where Gallade will simply be the much better. Of course Medicham has its niches (hence it remains A-), but Gallade is a more generalist approach and should be promoted.
Many of my previously A- ranked Pokémon have made the jump to A rank (
Chansey, Cofagrigus, Gastrodon, Skarmory) as they’re very well-positioned currently, and have proven themselves within SPL as well as after.
I don’t know if I’ve missed a major change that I’ve made around the top ranks, but if I did I can
probably explain it