All Gens Grass-Types

[Umby]

Similar to that other discussion I made on Fire-types.

I was in a random chat where someone mentioned that Grasses generally sucked. While obviously that's incorrect, as I thought about it, they do have specific niches that make them useful, such as resistance to Electric/Water moves (some of the most common and in the case of Electric, possibly the most dangerous type of moves)and often access to useful moves like Sleep Powder, Stun Spore, and Leech Seed.

We don't often see too many Grass-types in OU tiers, though:
RBY: Exeggutor
GSC: Exeggutor
ADV: Celebi
DPP: Breloom, Celebi, Roserade, Shaymin

And outside of ADV, Grasses don't seem to exist much in the BL tiers, instead populating the UU/NU tiers. Obviously, generally weak movepools and often lower speed contribute, but what else keeps Grass-types from succeeding? What strengths can they expound on to make themselves more useful?

 

[Borat]

I think resistance to Ground and neutrality to Rock is what made them (Egg) viable the first gen.

Then when GSC rolled around, water is a nice bonus. And it (again, just Egg) "forced" electrics to go with boltbeam instead of boltwater or something.

Grass is a great defensive typing. Shitty elsewhere.

 

[meteor64]

Celebi is the only grass you really see in Adv OU because its just simply better than all the others. Need a defensive pivot? Celebi has Natural Cure, Recover AND Seed, alongside excellent bulk. Why would you use Venusaur, Ludicolo or Vileplume (who are actually reasonably good when you don't consider Celebi's existence). Need a deadly set up sweeper? Celebi has Calm Mind and still has that bulk and instant recovery. Egg can't boast that versatility as a sweeper despite sharing the same attacking movepool (and Explosion), and Ludicolo has an equally sparse offensive movepool and can't make use of Synthesis in rain. Additionally both of them are reliant on weather to do any kind of sweeping. Sceptile has one STAB and a crappy offensive movepool with no boosting moves outside of (lol) Swords Dance. As a Subseeder Breloom and Cacturne (yes, him) are both probably better than Celebi but Subseeders are pretty awkward to use, being completely reliant on Spikes and other support, and often just get pressure drained by the likes of Zapdos and Cune anyway.

Honestly, I wouldn't say grasses are bad in Adv, there's just one grass to rule them all.

 

[Jorgen]

Even without Gengar the fact that they were EQ-weak and were both weak to Psychic would have made Egg preferred in RBY anyway.

But yeah Grass has always been a stellar defensive type. It's just the fact that Grass-types either have horrible secondary typings which limit their defensive effectiveness or they just can't do anything on the offensive side but sit there and wait to die. Egg got Psychic as its second type in RBY, which only made it better on defense. In GSC Psychic typing made it a bit of a liability at times but gave it the necessary STAB for actually doing worthwhile damage with its attacks.

 

[Crystal_]

Want to say that Victreebel is pretty good in RBY: Wrap, Stun Spore, Razor Leaf, Sleep Powder/Hyper Beam. Granted, it does nothing to gengar other than status but otherwise is definitely really dangerous. Plus it's a great Slowbro counter!

 

[Hemp Man]

Well, Grass is good in Gen 5: Ferrothorn, Celebi, Breloom, Venusaur, and Abombasnow.

Problem with Grass is that they often only seem to get Grass and Normal moves to work with, and like any Steel type can stop that.