It's one week in and I got my reqs, so I guess I'll talk about my personal experience with Mega Medicham and its overcentralizing influence so far.
To get my reqs, I personally used a complete cteam to Mega Medicham Psychic that was built purely to beat it with quite a few tech options. There's pretty much no way Psychic could beat my team, although I did lose once because Thunder Punch paralyze -> full paralysis -> full paralysis really just can't be helped. Because I was cteaming Psychic, I had no choice but to weaken a lot of my other matchups. In what's supposed to be one of my type's more reliable matchups, I had to play very carefully to win because I lacked the Pokemon that normally made that matchup good. I also lacked one of the best checks to Water teams, which I saw quite often in both stall and rain HO variants. I weighed having a 100% matchup vs Psychic (barring extreme luck of course) to be more valuable than beating two other very common types. Obviously I wouldn't build teams that have no contingency plans against common threats on non-Psychic teams, but I heavily relied on surprise and unorthodox sets and strategies that would probably fail against players that have seen my team in action before.
Personally, I find this rock-paper-scissors result to be really problematic. The pre-Mega Medicham metagame was not nearly as matchup based as the metagame is now. Regardless of whether I think Mega Medicham is in itself broken, the fact that it has induced a completely matchup-based metagame is pretty unacceptable. I'll reference the ORAS Mega Sableye suspect quickly. Types that could not beat Mega Sableye normally had overly specific options that they could use at the cost of weakening all of their other matchups. While Mega Medicham is not as oppressive as ORAS Mega Sableye was, as it doesn't outright invalidate multiple types, it still forces the entire metagame to build around it. When your options are mutually exclusive {Beat Mega Medicham Psychic and lose to most standard teams, beat most standard teams and lose to Mega Medicham Psychic}, that's not a metagame that encourages skillful building and play. That's not to say there isn't any skill at all; I think the method I got reqs with is evidence of that. However, I think it also reflects the almost absurd amounts of care and attention I had to give Mega Medicham to succeed.
I should note that's all with me using a cteam to Mega Medicham. I've been watching many people ladder with a wide range of skill levels and the most successful were also using Psychic cteams (a couple were also doing very well with my team in fact). People that weren't cteaming Psychic generally either took much longer to get reqs or couldn't at all. I think that really says a lot about Mega Medicham's influence on the ladder.
Over the 40 some games I played and over 100 I watched, the main teams I were seeing on the ladder were:
- Psychic
- HO Steel
- non-HO Steel
- Fairy
- Flying
- Bug
- Rain Water
- Stall Water
- Poison
It's pretty simple to break this into three groups:
{Mega Medicham Psychic: Psychic} beats {Standard teams: non-HO Steel, Fairy, Flying, Poison}
{Standard teams: non-HO Steel, Fairy, Flying, Poison} beat (for the most part) {Psychic cteams: HO Steel, Bug}.
{Psychic cteams: HO Steel, Bug, Rain Water} beat {Mega Medicham Psychic: Psychic}
Stall is honestly maybe okay right now but the people using it have not even been close to getting reqs, probably due to a skill issue.
I won't speak to how effective some of these teams were in the hands of some players, as there is a huge sample range, but on average assuming proper play, this is the result I would expect. This is far removed from the usual type matchups because they're created purely because Mega Medicham exists and makes Psychic teams almost impossible to beat normally without a fully tailored build.
Looking at MPL, I think the best-of-three format most noticeably exposes the nature of the metagame and how overcentralized teambuilding is right now. These replays show just how different SM Monotype is and what emphasis builders are putting on Mega Medicham, in either using it or cteaming it. Specifically, they're teams where
both players either used Psychic or used a Psychic cteam.
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7monotype-565565353 (Two cteams)
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7monotype-276136 (Two Psychic teams)
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7monotype-562408530 (Two cteams)
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7monotype-562757076 (Psychic vs a cteam)
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7monotype-276144 (Psychic vs a cteam)
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7monotype-565530740 (Using Ghost in 2017 (cwl) vs fun and interactive Psychic)
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7monotype-564069859 (Two Psychic teams)
7 out of the 19 battles so far had
both players specifically targeting Mega Medicham or using it. That's not even including the battles where only one team had Mega Medicham or only one team was cteaming it. If one team was cteaming and the other wasn't Psychic or if one team used Psychic and the other wasn't a cteam, you get one try to guess which team won almost every single time. If you ask any of the builders for best-of-three SM (or SM in general), I'm sure they can tell you all about how ever so fun it is to be build like this right now when Mega Medicham looms in the back of our minds the whole time. Fun is, of course, subjective and irrelevant, but the question is really about the underlying issue of the three-way disjunct mandate we're given: use Psychic, beat Psychic, or beat cteams.
Personally, I see Mega Medicham as broken because it all but necessitates its usage or usage of some over-the-top check. Yes there is skill in weighing the costs and deciding between which team to use. There is skill in doing smart preparation. That's what was Monotype without Mega Medicham. However, right now we're not really even playing Pokemon and making good plays and builds. We're just
matching pennies.