do we really need to suspect it?
take a look here
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_YNxkEEfvP607TEN0yGdIIm9p1Hxo4nVuWKHARNCfio/edit#gid=0
so many things that just kill jirachi at the top of the list
I counted like 4 of the top 10 and only 2 of those do rlly well against diancie, and most of the top 30 gets buttfucked by diancie as well. You really need to start thinking about jirachi's partner rather than just repeating over and over that jirachi can die to shit lol.
also at this point derivations is the only person that thinks jirachi is OP.
p sure braverius is relevant or something, but yeah if it's only a couple ppl we technically shouldnt have a suspect; I will say that jirachi is still gay as hell and I think a suspect should be in order. it's not healthy, but it's like a different not-healthy than mence and a similar one to skymin.
Jirachi doesn't make the game more fun for either side. I have played games with and against thalky or checkroom-ish stuff and it can turn out to be fun and exciting, whereas jirachi is all about positioning. You have to stop the jirachi before it can assist diancie or azumarill (though azu less so in this meta) by keeping ur v important assets in place, which really restricts teambuilding. I get that it's still pretty likely that u can win against jirachi+diancie with a somewhat unprepared team; that is the most evil thing about the just barely unhealthy mons - they still give p decent odds to win even if a team isn't built in anticipation of something such as jirachi or (as it applies to this somewhat as well) skymin, and so people just don't look too much into it. But most games with jirachi center the entire match around stopping jirachi from putting in serious work against the opposing team. Maybe sometimes jirachi isn't even much of a worry, like if the opponent brings a landorus-t to fuck you over, but it's so easy to compensate for any of jirachi's weaknesses that you can put on like kyurem-b and it can do things such as wall rain to oblivion or stop landorus-t in its tracks, and then maybe sometimes, when jirachi isn't the center of everything, it just becomes something like kyurem-b, a persisting problem for non-functioning teams.
Personally, I sort of follow what checkmater has said before in "positioning is a part of every game and it makes games more mind-game like, which is fun" or something like that, and I agree with that, but only up to a certain point. You can't make it entirely about positioning or else playing mons becomes like playing chess, which is its own game already and we needn't stray away from the fun and enjoyable meta game that brings us back to (or immerses us deeper into) our childhood. For the most part, the smogon meta game has brought more cerebrality into the game, and that's good, but bringing in so much that the entire game revolves around whether one event happens or not sucks a lot. I do not mean to advocate brainless clicking, or poor judgement, but I mean to say that things needn't be so complex.
This was probably a lot to say pre-suspect, but I really don't want it to get to a point where we just drop the idea of banning jirachi.
lets ban swagger, belly drum, and that type of shit though.
Swagger is gay. I agree with that one.
Now that we have Volcanion though, jirachi+azu just goes from awesome to like somewhat decent. And azumarill really is just a gimmick that people use a lot, it's honestly comparable to perish trap but perish trap usually can't save itself from even the slightest bad matchup whereas things like bunnies or just azu can do well against scarier teams. Just play around the azumarill right, they're really predictable despite being scary af and it's ridiculously hard to support an azumarill even with a jirachi honestly. It can be viable, yes, but it's not too amazing to warrant any suspect.