I'd like to point out that Ad Hominem doesn't necessarily have to be an insult. It can also be making generalizations based on the person, like-
"Well he would say that wouldn't he?"
"Charles Manson wrote this song, so it is about murder"
"He wants to ban Deo-D because he's ban happy"
My personal opinion on the worst and most common fallacies (with help from Eo to seperate and name them) here are:
1. Concern about invoking effects on other tiers-
"If we ban Sand Veil Cacturne, we lessen it's performance in NU. We should attempt to balance the effects of banning Sand Veil in NU because it's not that much different for OU."
-Both sides are required to agree to the basic idea that OU takes absolute priority on Smogon being the main metagame. If a ban would completely invalidate an already existing tier then for simplicity sake we wouldn't go through with it, but that just won't happen.
2. Forecasting future metagames / suspects-
-"BW2 is a terrible metagame, even if we ban Keldeo there are still 5-10 other pokes I find broken so none of them are worth the trouble"
-"Banning Drizzle would cause an imbalance of weathers, leaving OU spiraling out of control"
For simplicity sake, what Smogon does is ban anything >50% agreed upon to be broken in the current metagame, then deal with the potential problem if it arises. If there is agreement that something can't exist in a balanced metagame, we have nothing to lose by dealing with the problems losing it creates. If XY was out in a week maybe this would change, but that's not the case.
3. Ignoring the big picture-
"The banlist cannot be bigger than 10-15 pokemon. Therefore, we should not ban anything."
"Removing Deo-D removes or cripples a currently existing playstyle. This makes the metagame less balanced."
This is more of a broad fallacy, but the idea is that arguing about anything besides whether or not the suspect is broken is generally a no-no. There is no point in a 10 pokemon banlist if the consensus is no balanced metagame, and like the last one we remember that there is nothing to lose by banning a pokemon agreed to be broken, even if it hurts in the short term: it is in fact hurting us not to do it.
There are other fallacies that I don't think should be worth noting, but I DO see them frequently, so to be sure please no "The pokemon is bad in Ubers" or "Your argument is illogical because I disagree with the subjective part" or "Luck / team matchup is a basic factor of pokemon, meaning that even assuming it were to be the main factor of games we couldn't make bans to reduce it."
This is my 1k so please don't throw fallacies at this post unless your intentions are to add them to the list or just increase awareness of them! I'll also join in if you'll take me.
