#paraflinch

Personally, I don’t care much for bans in general, so as a basic rule of thumb, I’m opposed to most bans.  Evasion, however, is an exception I’m willing to keep, not because I actually feel its removal is necessary, but because I know how the metagame functions and EVERYONE would use Ninjask’s Baton Pass if it were allowed.  SwagPlay though…yeah, I’m still busting a gut over how Klefki’s swag game was too strong for competitive battlers.  Something about the wrath of Booboo Keys was just perfect.  It was a very strong strategy, I admit, but there was skill involved, and ways to get around it, albeit they were very, very difficult to do.

As for ParaFlinch, I’m perfectly fine with it.  It’s annoying, but I can’t say I’ve ever been put in a situation where I didn’t have a work-around.  Not to mention, it occurs in only two Pokemon, both of whom are threatening, but not so ubiquitous that I feel the contempt for them that I feel toward, say, Heatran, simply for existing.  As a strategy goes, it’s very effective, but is entirely shut down by every electric type in existence, anything that negates electric attacks, anything that cannot flinch, etc.  It may be the case that, unless you’re lucky, the opponent is guaranteed to take something out, but I’ve never followed the mindset that a guaranteed 1-1 loss is inherently uncompetitive, if such a term can be applied to anything at all.  The problem is that there’s a general mindset of “cheap” being code for “shouldn’t be allowed.”

I’m not a competitive player in fighting games, but I know enough to realize that there’s generally a fighting style that involves sitting in a corner and spamming projectiles at the opponent.  It’s the cheapest strategy in the book, but it’s constantly allowed.  Why?  Because there are ways around it.  If the strategy is that threatening to what you have, plan for it.  Adjust for it.  Learn the key players in the strategy and how to take it out with what you have.  In fight game terms, get good.  I’ve lost to plenty of obnoxious strategies, including evasion and SwagPlay, but I’ve never considered my losses the result of someone else being cheap and unfair.  The losses are mine because I wasn’t ready for it.  Sometimes I can adjust to fix it.  Other times I cannot.  In the cases where I can’t, I have two options: switch up the team so I can handle it, or keep what I like and accept that there are some teams I’m very likely never going to beat.  The reason I have so many problems with Smogon’s ban policy is that they’re acting half in the second, but while simultaneously claiming they should never lose.  They don’t want to adapt and change just to handle a strategy their team is unprepared for, so everyone gets salt and collectively bans the thing they dislike.  Case in point: Mega Mawile.  She had counters out the ass.  Regardless of what set she was running, she was not that hard to take down, but she was banned because no one wanted to have to adjust their teams to make it happen.  Sometimes it would’ve been as simple as an unexpected Pokemon having a fire move, like my Roserade with Hidden Power Fire.  But they don’t want to do that.  Innovation isn’t necessary when you just want to win all the time with the same teams.  So as a general rule, no, I don’t support any type of ban without some damn good reasoning, and I don’t consider “it’s kinda cheap and really hard to beat” a decent reason.

block recommended w/ xkit