No, it (saying there is no counterplay) is not (giving Gothitelle an extremely one-sided look). Once you switch Gothitelle in to something, there is no switching out. Therefore, there is no counter play until your [insert trapped pokemon] is already crippled or killed. In fact, saying there is no counterplay to trapping with Gothitelle is entirely true unless you want to resort to the argument of double switching into Gothitelle each and every time, but that requires spot-on prediction and prediction's a two-way-street, so that's not a valid argument whatsoever, in my opinion, although it does have some practical applications."if done right" is the keyword and saying that there's absolutely no counterplay to stag (or goth in particular) is giving the ability (pokemon) an extremely facile and one-sided look.
Actually, Goth may not technically be "threatening" to offensive teams, but it is able to neuter a threat to stall teams (i.e: TWave or Mirror Coat Mega Gardevoir - I encountered both of these in cycle 2, Trick Manaphy, Trick or TWave Hoopa, etc. - just three commonly recited and seen examples, comparable lines of logic can be applied to Goth v [insert stallbreaker] almost all the time!) and subsequently make it either a challenge or impossible for someone to break stall. This actually ties directly into a point Reymedy brought up:(Goth) isn't super threatening to teams that aren't exceedingly passive (extreme full stall that should normally be packing tar for it anyway), it kinda dies if you bring it in on the wrong turn, it's dead weight in quite a few matchups and you shouldn't really be leading with your breaker that beats your enemy's entire team anyway which is how a lot of people seem to get trapped in these replays that "prove that it's broken"
Gothitelle makes it so that breaking stall is a lot more challenging; even if there are a plethora of stallbreakers, there are a small amount of ones that can do much after Gothitelle is through with it. So yea, just because Gothitelle is a mediocre pokemon outside of its ability and that it lacks a presence to individually do work, it can be a nasty presence on stall that makes breaking it borderline impossible at times.Reymedy said:Stallbreakers :
We got a lot of them that can beat Stall teams.
We got some of them that can beat Stall and still be somehow viable outside of this matchup.
We got very very few of them that can beat Stall, still be somehow viable outside of this matchup, and not be totally ruined by a Scarf Gothitelle using Trick or Thunder Wave.
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With this said, pretty much every other OU player that posted has been in favor of some sort of ban, so I'm going to get into how I believe this should be handled instead of if anything needs to be done or not as that's the pressing issue at the moment.
One thing that I find interesting is the fact that (from what I've been told), a suspect (or whatever you'd like to label this thread as) wasn't taking place for this until Gothitelle saw significant usage and success in tournaments (which it did in SmogTour, week 1) despite it being dominant and a major nuisance on the ladder (see: Gothitelle / Mega Sableye / Chansey / Quagsire / Skarmory / Amoonguss or filler stall archetype popularized by BOF and specifically ABR). Now I question why we would suspect Gothorita or the whole evolution line without them seeing any usage. If you're going to make an argument to suspect more than Gothitelle, then the argument is to suspect Shadow Tag as an ability, not to suspect the whole evolution line like some have been saying, in my opinion. With this said, I think that a sole suspect of Gothitelle would be the solution the the problem now as Wobb still hasn't proved itself in any setting (ok, it has seen a small amount of usage on the ladder and can be an irksome presence, but it has no tournament representation, which Gothitelle needed for this to be investigated in the first place, and the representation on the ladder from Wobb is much less practical and directly beneficial than Gothitelle's). I'm not gong to write some essay (sorry to all of my fans) on what we should do as I'd be fine with seeing Shadow Tag going at some point or another, but given the line of logic applied to form a pre-requisite for this suspect to be put in place, I think that getting rid of Gothitelle only right now and then dealing with potential future problems (be it Gothorita or Wobb) when they come up is the optimal route.