Ultra Necro in USM

[Master Chief]

I don't want to probably write pages about this but I think there's been a ton of discussion in the Ubers discord about ultra necrozma making playing around necrozma a glorified guessing game. Pretty much in short, both unnecro and regular DM have different defensive counterplay and different checks. Unnecro for example can be trapped and rked by gengar but regular DM is bulky enough to just neuter gengar. Pdon can check regular DM fine mostly but if necro sds on a switch and ultra bursts, you lose your pdon very freely. Support arcs also have similar issues and if you guess what the DM/unnecro set is wrongly, you give it a free turn to cause havoc and remove a portion of the team or your support arc which has p big implications. To compound this, ultra necro can run a ton of different sets. It can run the good old sd, with outrage to break through darks, it can run calm mind that takes advantadge of some arcs like wisp waterceus and also escape being checked by support groundceus or a groundceus that hasn't cmed etc. It can even run rocks ultra and nuke your marsh. This along with the multitude of sets DM can run makes playing vs unnecro a guessing game and a headache to play around. I think inherently the tier can handle DM and it's a healthy addition but something should be done to address unnecro.

So in short, I propose that for the next upcoming USM ubers tours, we ban the z crystal ultranecrozium Z so that unnecro can't ultra burst. This would enable the tier and the playerbase to sort of determine whether unnecro really is a problem and how much better the tier is with or without unnecro similar to what was done in the oras invitational for darkrai. Fc can probably handle the stuff about surveys and the logistics of what tours to cut the z crystal from for the future if there's enough support but after talking to a lot of people, I feel there is some inherent support for this idea. I was a bit lazy in making this post but I'm happy for more discussion about unnecro to be fostered to determine where the playerbase stands on this subject.

 

[LBN]

Alright, i'll pipe in w this quickly, I don't play USUM enough to give in depth input on U-Nec so I'm not going to bother but, doing tiering experimentation in the most important tour ubers has to its name is a terrible idea and should be done on its own tour like a USUM invitational at some point.

 

[Gondra]

Don't try to fix what isnt broken, something rlly cool about sm ubers is the diversity of sets and the amount of offensive things you can use for break pasive teams, ultra necrozma is one of the best wallbreakers in the tier and removing it would only make passive builds better, at least that is what i think

 

[SparksBlade]

Your (incomplete) title seems to suggest you want to do something about Ultra Necrozma in the tier itself, and your post ends with a proposal to ban it "for the next upcoming USM ubers tours", so I'll focus on the latter only.

I can tell you that there's almost no chance of any of the tours that are already in the 2022 Ubers Tour Schedule being changed to have this new proposed USM Ubers format with a custom rule. We'll not run our official circuit tournaments or team tournaments with an experimental and custom tier. I cannot speak for the people hosting/playing SMPL. If you want a tournament to gauge how the tier will be if Ultra Necrozma were to be banned, you're welcome to submit a request for a (Type C) tour and we can consider it. You might also have an alternative option to host the tour in the Unofficial Tournaments Subforum. Otherwise your final option is probably to just host an invitational or something else on Discord.

 

[byulharang]

as a former good usm ubers player I feel conflicted on this topic
Want to start off with I 100% agree with Gondra. I can see why people would want it banned but I looked back at the three most recent team tours (Uwtt, Wcup, Upl) and unec honestly did..mediocre? I know winrate doesn't just determine if a Pokemon is broken or not but just to show how it does in tours it went 10-12 with 15 Kos(+6 vs a weirder stall team would make it 21 kos and not counting a meme game, not cherry picking i swear). The only game it steamrolled was vs some ditto stall and it never came off as broken to me in any of the replays from a quick glance, many games it did not even pick up a Ko or do anything but die. Those maybe not so meaningful stats aside, Unec has common counterplay with mons like scarf ygod, scarf xern, mgar, marshadow, gira-o, darkceus, etc. Calling it a guessing game is an overstatement imo as you can assume sets based on their team and how they play, for example dm+magearna you could normally assume its an unec or a possible fully offensive dm, a balance team or something that looks weak to xern having a dm you can assume its standard bulky dm etc. This isn't 100% though of course but MOST of the time it isn't just a random unec, much less an unec that just fucks you over and wins. I have prepped the last few tours in usm and never thought it was broken, annoying sometimes? absolutely. I think lots of things in Usm are annoying and broken if you let go of your counterplay. I assume your post is focusing on determining if unec is broken by testing it in tours as opposed to outright banning unec? Not sure how this would accurately go as testing in Upl would be a bad idea and people wouldn't care much about a subforum Unlecless tour. I think sending a survey out would be the best first step and if enough people think Unec is problematic, we can find a way to accurately test it or vote then. Usm cup is the next usm tour which is in like 2-3 weeks and should not be changed last minute. Edit: Sparks covered a lot of what I was going to say regarding no unec tours so I will cut it short
in conclusion to my rushed post I don't think unec should be banned, if its tested or w.e cool but just dont do it during UPL please. just thought I should make a quick post as an usm main over the years that still starts in the slot. I am open to seeing pro ban arguments though since discussion is healthy

 

[Master Chief]

Firstly for how this should be done: if changing UPL is out of the question, I suppose the only thing to do is to just hold a subforum tour but that's basically gonna kill the idea right here. I think honestly if Fc holds a survey for the relevant parties involved i.e. those who've played USM in the past year or two, it would be the first step to canvas opinion that way and see where that goes in terms of options. In some sense I was hoping for a sort of farceus treatment to this but that was probably too much wishful thinking

I'll address Gondra's and HG's post together since they have similar stances:

as a former good usm ubers player I feel conflicted on this topic
Want to start off with I 100% agree with Gondra. I can see why people would want it banned but I looked back at the three most recent team tours (Uwtt, Wcup, Upl) and unec honestly did..mediocre? I know winrate doesn't just determine if a Pokemon is broken or not but just to show how it does in tours it went 10-12 with 15 Kos(+6 vs a weirder stall team would make it 21 kos and not counting a meme game, not cherry picking i swear). The only game it steamrolled was vs some ditto stall and it never came off as broken to me in any of the replays from a quick glance, many games it did not even pick up a Ko or do anything but die.

Part of the problem with this argument I feel is that what makes it broken is not the pokemon in isolation. There are plenty of mons in tours you'll see with bad winrates due to how they are overprepped for and I don't think NDM is an exception. The other thing is that how many KOs it picks up isn't an amazing metric. A lot of the time, ultra can nab an important KO or net some game changing damage due to how you determine its counterplay should be in a game e.g. pdon, support waterceus, groundceus. That itself can flip the game on its head because well, you guessed wrong.

Unec has common counterplay with mons like scarf ygod, scarf xern, mgar, marshadow, gira-o, darkceus, etc. Calling it a guessing game is an overstatement imo as you can assume sets based on their team and how they play, for example dm+magearna you could normally assume its an unec or a possible fully offensive dm, a balance team or something that looks weak to xern having a dm you can assume its standard bulky dm etc. This isn't 100% though of course but MOST of the time it isn't just a random unec, much less an unec that just fucks you over and wins

Scarf ygod to me only really sticks out as consistent counterplay in this argument which itself is a revenge killer and not a consistent check. The others will have problems checking unnecro/ndm for different reasons. Regarding your point about guessing which set it is, it's possible to determine this sometimes, but for sure not always. If I use your example about mage + ndm and I'll add a pdon here too, there are definitely many different permutations possible here: 1) mage + sd rocks ndm + offensive don 2) mage+ rocks tox ndm + offensive groudon 3) mage + dual dance ndm + offensive groudon 4) mage + ultra rocks ndm + offensive groudon 5) mage + ultra necro + rocks groudon. My point here is to not enumerate that ubers has many sets, but rather that it's not always easy to just determine if necro can be ultra or not. Talking about this example though is something which is in more of a vacuum so I'll show you a few replays of what I mean. Also a friendly reminder that we had a host in UWTT who hasn't updated the replay thread since week 3 despite the fact that tour is actually over :

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7ubers-604723 - gondra ultra bursted his necro here and without it, well he doesn't really have a steel mon so something like thunder geo xern can pose a problem for him if he isn't careful. He has the traditional counterplay to most stuff but it's almost surely not immediately obvious that he's ultra on this team.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7ubers-591732 - another gondra replay, I wanted to highlight this one since HO can almost surely afford to run random ultras
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7ubers-591592 - on both of these teams the sets I'd say are p unexpected. Goat heart very easily can be an rocks ndm, offensive ndm or ultra.

There are other replays which have offensive NDM which also can be ultra. I've elected to not show these now since it's more hypothetical but I can show them if needed.

Regarding the point about unnecro making fat better, this is possible, but if the tier becomes a fatass shitshow, at least we'll know. It's impossible to determine this in a vacuum without a way to actually experiment with the tier. Open to hearing proposals on how to do this beyond a subforum tour people probably won't care about and will be dead. Without some monetary incentive, I don't think an invitational will work unless the playerbase expresses an interest in this

 

[Garay oak]

I’m not one to usually write lengthy posts, so I won’t do it now either. I think the most important thing we have to consider here is what beats ultra necrozma. And as it turns out, every single revenge killer in this tier can get rid of it either from full or just with a bit of chip once it ultra bursts. Scarf xerneas, both scarf and dread plate yveltal (the latter being the most prominent set atm), LO/CB marshadow, mega gengar, and depending on its set, darkceus or fairyceus can all revenge kill it once it kills something or even hard switch into it in some cases. As rabbit previously stated, it’s not obvious whether a necrozma will be ultra or not on some teams, but the reason for that is that said teams would be missing a secondary steel type, and that indubitably makes your team defensively weaker once necrozma transforms, or just by virtue of it having no bulk investment because it’s designated to sweep with max atk/speed. All of this evidently hinders ultra necrozma’s splashability and sweeping potential, and in my opinion it’s clear that this pokemon is not (and never has been) a problem to this tier.

 

[plat27]

I'm pretty much in agreement with garay/gondra here but I'd just like to add a couple of things.

First off, fitting counterplay to unecro isn't very restrictive at all and all of the options can be valuable in other matchups. Things like gengar, marshadow, mmy and dread plate yveltal are some of the best offensive/breaker mons in the tier and are things that you would want to be running even if unecro was banned. Scarf Yvel / Xerneas also have good support moves, revenge kill other threats and make teams much stronger against offense.

There's also significant downsides to using unecro in terms of trying to build teams with solid defensive cores. There's the problems with using it as the sole steel as garay mentioned but this even extends to the ways that u can compensate for it with other fairy resists. Magearna + Unecro teams almost always have groudon and stacking 3 weaknesses to ground in a tier dominated by pdon and arc ground is a pretty big price to pay. Ho-oh is either forced to run a defensive set where its harder to get value on balance and forces you to dedicate another slot to keeping hazards off or remain weak to coverage moves from xerneas or being trapped by gengar if you use a more offensive variant. Ferrothorn is similarly weak to xerneas's coverage. All of these also remove ambiguity to whether or not its dusk or ultra. On offense this isn't a much of a problem but using it makes teams much more prone to getting run through by common anti offense stuff like the previously mentioned scarfers and marshadow.

Overall, I just dont really see it as a problem.

 

[Fc]

I'm willing to engage this discussion further if there is heavy support from the players of this tier, but looking at this thread so far with its few posts and talks with other players in the ubers discord and side servers the want to ban Ultra Necrozma just isn't there. If this does garner any sort of backing I'll happily throw together a survey in the coming days, but as it stands there is a very high chance nothing comes out of this without any vocal support from more than 1-2 people.

Putting in my own opinion, I think it's not overwhelming in any way and has very viable counterplay while also having an opportunity cost to use, which is why I just don't think it's worth any action as is. Throughout my time playing SM, mainly in my live tour run but also in cup and stuff, I never felt it was oppressive, and generally you can figure out or adapt on the fly because the turn it takes to evolve it can't use the Z-move, along with the multitude of viable counterplay mentioned by Garay and plat. SM is already a past gen making representation in the circuit hard and interest from newer players lower, so testing anything would need a ton of support and something super limiting, especially in ubers, but personally I don't see it with Ultra Necrozma.

As Sparks said you're more than welcome to host a tour with this ruleset, just DM one of the mods if interested, as that's the best way to get this format out there because it won't be getting a trial run in any official team tours or SM cup as of now.

Given that I do want to make a survey and assess this situation much more if the support is there, I'll tag everyone who played SM in the recent UWTT who haven't given any for thoughts if you have some. If you can't post in this forum you can request access following this post.

Zesty43 HunterStorm Terracotta iry Mysterious M Rhmsitb SiTuM InkPupil obii Rasengan777 xavgb

 

[InkPupil]

pskr said ultra necrozma should be banned, cuz when outrage ultra necrozma is banned, his zekrom stall team will be no-enemy (laugh

Get back to the point, my opnion is that shouldnt ban the ultra necrozma.

First of all, I think we can't just look at ultra necrozma this pokemon or the Ultranecrozium Z when discussing the intensity of ultra necrozma. The reason is that although ultra necrozma's own quality is very high in the USM Ubers environment, the greater advantage of ultra necrozma lies in the change of resistance caused by morphological changes between ultra necrozma and DM/DW. If the DM/DW and the ultra necrozma are regarded as independent pokemon, whether they can have the current strength is uncertain. The banning of ultra necrozma is bound to affect the strength of DM/DW, therefore, whether to ban the ultra necrozma needs more careful discussion.

Considering both mules and light dragons, Alpha Rabbit mentioned the guessing game when facing the DM, in fact, there are a large number of revenge killers in the USM Ubers environment to deal with this situation, such as the scarf-ygod, scarf-xern, life orb-marshadow, lunala, gengar or arceus-dark,and even arceus-fairy can deal it in some situation. Among them, the arceus-dark, ygod and lunala can even choose stab and super-effevtive moves and directly avoid guessing boxing.

Then the ultra necrozma has brought a lot of changes to the environment, so that the environment will not be so dead. Also directly linked to the DM/DW, and the same excellent ATK and SPA of ultra necrozma, all of this make the build of the mule necrozma more diversified. Whether using these build, matching teammates around the build, or formulating counterbuild, it has brought a lot of diversity and interest to the team building. When it comes to the environment, we have to mention the violence in the environment: the fire-god pdon. The combination of DM/DW and ultra necrozma also limits the rampant arceus and adv double gods (Pdon and Pkyogre) in the environment to a certain extent, which is undoubtedly good for the environment. Assuming ban the ultra necrozma, Pdon will almost no longer have any pressure in the face of DM. The powerful fire will become an environmental nightmare, and so will the water of Pkyogre.

And there is also a very important point. As a past generation, USM, although ubers still retains ladder, the number and quality of ladder matches are not enough to support a banning vote. The competition environment is very different from that of ladder, which is difficult to be used as the basis for banning voting.

To sum up, I don't support ban the ultra necrozma. But as I said, this is a difficult thing to decide, which needs more and more detailed discussion. Everyone's views are worthy of reference.

----------under this is about the SwSh Ubers---------

Finally, as an aside, I think the pokemon that really brings pure guessing game to the environment is the Calyrex-Shadow, real nightmare!!

The upper limit of Calyrex-Shadow is invincible, and the lower limit is trick or nasty plot (easy sweep), if you guess wrong, you will be pierced by Calyrex-Shadow, Calyrex-Shadow has and has only one stable solution: Umbreon with the Snarl. Ygod will be destoryed by trick/np + draining kiss/disable + np, Tyranitar will be destoryed by np + grass knot.

The conventional single Ygod resistance Calyrex-Shadow is easy to overwork after being tricked, especially the single Ygod defogging team. If it is bulit with more defogging, it will inevitably be beaten by things like zekrom and goundon. When Ygod itself is weak against goundon and other thugs, choosing speed and bulk EVs is to abandon the basics and get rid in the face of choice specs Calyrex-Shadow. Moreover, Ygod must guess boxing when dealing with Calyrex-Shadow, especially after Calyrex-Shadow tricks Ygod, that is the real pure guessing game. If you lose, Calyrex-Shadow with sweep all ur team directly.


So I think it's better to start a banning vote on Calyrex-Shadow than the ultra necrozma.

 

[Hoopas Dad]

Pretty much what Garay said, and in extent what Gondra mentioned. USM Ubers is a great tier as it is, one of the best ubers imo from the perspective of versitility and ultra necro only adds positive aspects to this tier. There shouldn't really be a reason to ban it lol

 

[Rhmsitb]

Firstly I’m in complete agreement with what gondra and garay said "don't fix what isn't broken.”

I would reference the following forum thread in adding my point to this discussion:
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/tiering-policy-framework.3628026/
"""IV.) Probability management is a part of the game.

This means we have to accept that moves have secondary effects, that moves can miss, that moves can critical hit, and that managing all these potential probability points is a part of skill.​

This does NOT mean that we will accept every probability factor introduced to the game. Evasion, OHKO moves, and Moody all affected the outcome "too much", and we removed them.​

"Too much" is if a particular factor has the more skilled player at a disadvantage a considerable amount of the time against a less skilled player, regardless of what they do.​

V.) Team matchup management is a part of the game.

This means we have to accept that it's possible we will be at an advantage or disadvantage from the very beginning.​

With optimal team building skills, the pool of options (Pokemon, moves, items) present in the tier should allow you to build teams addressing the different team archetypes at least decently and offer a solution in-battle to a large majority of the principle threats of the metagame.​

"""

I think both these statements in tandem completely answer the questions raised by Alpha Rabbit. As we have already seen in the above posts, there are a multitude of pokemons which check dusk mane and ultra form (I would add both primals, sopport arceus forms, zygarde, mega slowbro, hooh, ditto, giratina to the list). This means that the thing in question is not broken. Personally (throughout my 25k+ usm ubers matches) i never once felt dusk mane or ultra as a threat to any of my average built teams.

I would also like to add these points from the following forum.
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ubers-tiering-policy-review-an-overview.3646567/
""" I'm going to start with some truths that I believe in as the current leader and as a user of the Ubers community.

- Ubers's tiering philosophy is a constant state of change, and likely will always be.​

- What I say or we do in terms of policy and philosophy in 2019 could well be "wrong" in 2022. We should avoid absolutes.​

- While we should learn from the past, we should not be held to it.​

- We should be more receptive to outside views. By this I mean avoid "gatekeeping", and we should be giving everyone the ability to see where we come from in our responses instead.​

idk whats up with these select player votes​

"if you played in this or that tournament you're allowed to vote on x issue"​

i think that falls under the lines of gatekeeping for sure​

people from other communities should be able to step in, those who play the tier but don't participate in select tournaments should have a say in the matter limiting it to anything else creates an echo chamber effect.​

"""
And i 100% agree with the above statements.
So we should not interfere in a tier which has been favourite of huge population of ubers players for years and they never felt like anything is ban worthy.

 

[Fc]

As much as I appreciate the enthusiasm, reminder that this thread is strictly about Ultra Necrozma in SM Ubers. If you do wish to discuss Calyrex-S in SS the metagame discussion thread is a much better place to do so, and I personally am down to debate all the points brought up here if the topic is moved. Any further posts discussing Calyrex-S will be deleted as to not derail the thread.