Hello everyone,
I have not been impressed with the general low level of discourse happening in this thread, so as a member of the SS Council I am going to make this post in an attempt to make things clearer for everyone.
Nearly all of the top SS players are unanimous in wanting to suspect Gothitelle before Calyrex-SR. This includes the entire QC, VR, and SS Councils as well as other top players including me, steelskitty, TrueNora, Icemaster, TonyFlygon, terra the creator, Skysolo, Staxi, FC, Pohjis, reje, and SiTuM, among others.
This is not to say that the Council is not interested in suspecting Calyrex-SR!! I cannot state this enough.
Anyone who thinks our interest in dealing with Gothitelle first is an indication we don't care about Calyrex is mistaken. It just so happens that all of the top level Ubers players tend to agree that Goth is a more pressing issue.
With that being said, it's not as though we're 100% decided, but if we were to just make this decision based upon what the council and other top players want right now, it would certainly be Gothitelle first.
For a more casual player of Ubers, this is a mon that you would probably only encounter on the ladder a few times at most, so you may not understand what the big deal about Gothitelle is. Sure, it has a really strong ability in Shadow Tag, but can it really compete with the Ubers titans? Well, for one, it absolutely can, and it has the most metagame impact of any mon in the tier for building. I am going to separate my main points into bullet points because I know this will become tl;dr for most people:
1.) Gothitelle usage is less than its potential due to it being seen as a cheap / boring mon to use.
I feel like this is an obvious point but it's something that needs to be stated. Sure, you can point to Goth's low winrate in Most Wanted, but it's total amount of usage was very low and out of a low sample size to begin with. I can state that for me personally I avoided using Gothitelle during the whole tournament out of my personal distaste for the mon, and I know TonyFlygon and at least some other users chose to do the same thing. For top level players, many recognize the deadly potential of Gothitelle and see using it as cheap. For usage on the ladder, of course Gothitelle's best set is it's PP stalling set, meaning that for practical uses it's basically impossible to ladder with that Gothitelle over a period of many games and not get bored to death.
Since some people have been mentioning it:
how old gens Ubers decided to not ban Gothitelle is not relevant at all to this discussion. In the first place, those votes were very controversial to begin with, but as I said before, it bears no relevance to this discussion. Let the SS Ubers playerbase decide what it wants to do with SS Ubers. If I wanted to, I could point out that trapping is essentially banned from every other tier, and there is nothing special that would separate Ubers in this regard, but again, it's just the best to let the SS playerbase decide for itself.
2.) All counterplay to Gothitelle has to be done in the builder, which makes the tier more match-up dependent.
This is the biggest problem with Gothitelle. There really is extremely little available counterplay to Gothitelle, and while you can try to be smart and say that it's your fault for letting Gothitelle get in in the first place, I really think this is a bad take. Do you know how many 50/50s over the course of a game you would have to win to never let Gothitelle come in on one of your mons vulnerable to it?
The Gothitelle user has to make a right prediction once and they are rewarded with a destroyed defensive core. As others have said, it's simply not competitive.
This is extremely noticeable with the current state of the tier, where powerful offensive mons basically have to force in a reactive check to it, such as Zacian-H or Xerneas forcing in Necrozma or Ho-Oh, Kyogre forcing in Etern, Groudon forcing in Tangrowth, Zekrom forcing in Ferrothorn, etc etc. This is even more of a problem when you consider that Gothitelle traps literally all of those defensive mons I've stated above, and more. These defensive mons are also basically mandatory on any team that is not a straight up HO, meaning that Gothitelle has an extremely good matchup against the vast majority of the tier. Sure, you could try to Goth-proof your entire team, but even that is not a defense against Gothitelle considering the ease of which Knock Off can be spammed. Not to mention, you have now just made your team worse against literally every other team that doesn't run Goth. Because of this, a lot of players simply make no effort to prepare for Goth and just hope they don't run into it.
Many players also will try to take half-measures and put some moveset changes in hope of deterring Goth, for example Dragon Tail Eternatus, but even many of these measures can easily be dealt with with a different Gothitelle set. Choice Specs for instance is extremely unexplored, and can basically deal with any Eternatus in the tier easily, and also work as a back-up cleric with Heal Bell as well as being able to Trick. Did you think HO is immune to Goth's shenanigans? Goth has a Choice Scarf set which can completely disable any HO lead with trick. It makes teambuilding a complete chore for minimal results if you chose to pay attention to Gothitelle, and if you simply ignore it, well then, I hope you got lucky with what you picked in builder!
You can argue that there is a risk/reward assessment for nearly any aspect of a game, but the thing about Gothitelle is that, when you make games match-up dependent to this degree, and games are decided in the builder, playing the game itself inherently becomes uninteresting.
When you are not deciding games by the plays you make, but entirely by what team you happened to choose, then you aren't playing a competitive game anymore, you are playing a game of rock paper scissors. Modern counterplay to Gothitelle essentially consists of hoping they don't have the Gothitelle that your team is vulnerable to.
3.) Gothitelle is effective. This also decreases variety in the tier.
I really don't like the argument that Gothitelle is not good at it's job. It's just simply false. For example,
Ropalme1914 said:
If we look at replays, what about this one:
[Gen 8] Ubers replay: faint vs. Lopunny kicks - Pokémon Showdown (pokemonshowdown.com)
We see Gothitelle trapping Dugtrio after it had already defeated Eternatus, and when it came time to defeat a 50% HP paralyzed defensive Necrozma-DM with a Charm set...it simply lost. It wasn't even a Goth-tailored set with SD or something, it was a standard Knock Off one.
I am really surprised you chose this replay to highlight, because this is really a flawed analysis. For one, Gothitelle in this game as already trapped one Pokemon and eliminated it, meaning it has already done it's job. That Dugtrio could have proceeded to cockblock his Zacian for the rest of the game. Two, in this replay faint Charms the Necrozma-DM when Goth is at 13% HP, when he could have gone for Rest again and fish for more parahax. Three, this Gothitelle is likely a high speed variant, which still traps NDM, just not while hard switching into Knock Off with Stealth Rock up. Fourth, even with Gothitelle not eliminating Nec here, it still lands a charm on it letting Zacian-C set-up when it wouldn't have normally been able to.
Ropalme1914 said:
Goth's trapping capabilities also are being overblown here in my opinion: if you're phys def, you won't trap Eternatus if you come into Dynamax Cannon, even if it's defensive without Dragon Tail. If you're Sp. Def, you aren't trapping Necrozma-DM either with Knock Off avaliable, so you don't need to rely on SD for defensive variants directly either. Simply listing which Pokémon it traps without context also makes it seems far worse than it actually is - Rayquaza can also threaten basically every Pokémon on the tier, but you can't run a set with Dragon Ascent, V-Create, Earthquake, Draco Meteor, Extreme Speed, Swords Dance, Dragon Dance, Life Orb, Focus Sash, etc. all on the same set.
You are right, it is unfair if lump in together all of the Gothitelle sets into one. So, let's just go down the VR and see which mons just the PP stalling set can trap, shall we?
Necrozma-DM
Eternatus lacking Dragon Tail (even this isn't foolproof due to dtail doing no damage)
Some Defensive Zygardes
Defensive Xerneas
Defensive Groudon lacking Dragon Tail
Defensive Ho-Oh
Ferrothorn lacking Bullet Seed (lol)
Blissey
Tyranitar without a strong dark move
Buzzwole lacking Lunge
Tangrowth
Skarmory
Lugia
Defensive Caly-Ice
Porygon-2
Gastrodon
Tapu Bulu
Heatran
Amoonguss
Even some variants of Yveltal lacking U-Turn/Taunt
Yeah, this is basically almost every defensive mon in the tier bar Lunala.
This is not even to mention the side use Gothitelle has versus offensive Pokemon, which should not be ignored. Your Band Zacian-Hero locked itself into Close Combat to try and break through NDM? Yep, Gothitelle just eats it now.
Now about my point of Gothitelle eliminating variety in the tier. You know stall builds? Yeah, literally all of them lose to Gothitelle, if the above wasn't proof enough by itself. Additionally, you are going to be much more likely to use the higher tier mons, like Nec and Ho-Oh, that at least somewhat have a chance of being able to beat a Gothitelle in favorable conditions, than something on the lower part of the viability rankings, like say, Amoonguss. In contrast, I can't think of any lower-tier Pokemon being used just because they have a better Gothitelle match-up.
4.) This is a subjective point, but I feel it's important to bring up anyway: Gothitelle is supremely boring to use, especially the PP stall set.
Again. this is subjective and not as important as the other points, but I feel that the vast majority of players would agree with this.
I could keep going, but I think this a good place to stop for now. By the way, my instinct is to ban Shadow Tag and not Gothitelle itself, but either way is fine I think and it's not something we need to worry about in particular too much in my opinion.