If a mon activates Color Change, will it be changed into a monotype? Asking this so I can try to think of something for it too.
Yes: similar to Protean it changes into a monotype for the rest of the game.If a mon activates Color Change, will it be changed into a monotype? Asking this so I can try to think of something for it too.
I personally find this one to be the most interesting in the pool, so I'll focus mostly on them here.
- Color Change
- How can we benefit from this ability offensively? Defensively?
- How much control is given to the opponent by letting them manipulate your typing?
- How can this level of control be overcome? How can we benefit from it?
As promised, here are the questions regarding the four abilities being discussed.
- Color Change
- How can we benefit from this ability offensively? Defensively?
- How much control is given to the opponent by letting them manipulate your typing?
- How can this level of control be overcome? How can we benefit from it?
210 under slow start is effectively about base 80, which is still not goodOk to all the people responding saying “you forgot to halve EVs and IVs” for Slow Start, that’s totally fair. But it’s also missing the point. 170 was just an example. What it you put it at 210 or something? I’m not a math expert. Pick a number that’s good when halved. The point was that you can get a result similar to setup sweepers investing 2 turns of Dragon Dance. Rather than viewing it as a negative ability, view it as similar to “plus 2 stages each after 5 rounds”.
But anyway enough on old topics. For color change, my first thought was: Pivoting is a necessity. You need to be able to avoid things like chained dragon hits, and you can’t lose too much value doing it. Another possibility would be picking a base typing like steel, which guides the list of likely first hits into a narrow selection, assuming you pivot in undamaged. And of course the big issue is STAB. No stab friggen sucks. And we can’t really risk just giving 1.5x stats or something. A weird possibility would be stuff like Mirror Move or Mimic; they’d suddenly allow STAB. Regardless, this mon need considerable bulk and offenses both just to compensate for the control opponents have over it. Another compensatory method would be just to give a huge variety of non-STAB options that are typically stronger power than you’d normally see. Alternatively, one bizarre option is Revelation Dance for constant stab, but I worry that would see nearly unanimous play.
The other three I don’t really have as much thoughts on. E. Exit will have lots of options that I’m not clever enough to see, and the other two don’t interest me that much; other than working with trapping perish body doesn’t do much, and personally I’d go so far as to veto Mimicry just for the significant chance of having 0 downside in a game, which goes against concept.
Honestly, Mimicry doesn't seem that detrimental of an ability. It's definitely not a good ability, but it seems situationally bad only some of the time. If you check the Snake Draft usage stats, our most recent tour, we can see Rillaboom is Top 23 usage at 9.26%, Tapu Fini is Top 7.41%, Tapu Koko is Top 39 at 3.70% usage, and Tapu Lele is Top 59 at 1.23% usage. For Mimicry to activate on a consistent basis (and thus be an actual hinderance to CAP29), I think you'd need terrain setters to be used a lot more. You also can't just simply add up the percentages above because teams can have multiple terrain setters, and, honestly, I don't want to go and count what percentage of teams had at least one terrain setter. To make it worse, Tapu Fini usage is inflated from Snake Draft stats because Urshifu was in the metagame. Now that Urshifu is banned, Tapu Fini usage has declined, so the chances of running into a terrain is even lower than before. Bottom line, not all battles are going to have terrains up, so Mimicry will kick in some of the time, but not all the time. In battles without terrain, Mimicry is essentially Run Away or Honey Gather, so I really don't think it's a "detrimental" ability as we outlined in Concept Assessment.Mimicry
- How detrimental of an ability is Mimicry?
- How can we make this differently from any other terrain abuser and still benefit from it?
Perhaps not a bulky special attacker specifically as speed matters less to that archetype, but arguing that special attacking in general is anti-concept is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A special attacker who makes use of and/or is hampered by the speed element of Slow Start is entirely within concept. I don't see a reason why it has to make use of every aspect of the ability and not just one.Sorry to double post, but I think this is worth mentioning.
Should Slow Start be chosen, we cannot just make a bulky special attacker. In that scenario, we are completely ignoring the downsides of Slow Start, which is essentially anti-concept. Keep this in mind when you vote. I see a couple people saying that Slow Start would be good on a special attacker, but in doing so we would basically be making a mon with no ability, rather than having any meaningful interaction with our bad ability. I fail to see what we would learn from this, as CAP already has plenty of bulky special attackers (see Equilibra, Jumbao, and Cyclohm). Especially when considering the cases of Jumbao and Cyclohm, who do not rely on their abilities to be viable, I think we would need to go in a physical direction to fulfill the concept and have meaningful discussion about how to work with a bad ability.
Frankly, no, we don't "all agree" on this; the very existence of people arguing in Normalize's favor disproves that.We all agree that the utility Normalize provides is gimmicky at best. Normalize Thunder Wave is still worse than Glare; A Normal Future Sight is still eaten up by a large portion of the most common Future Sight switch-ins, being Steel Types and Tyranitar.
The comparison of Spectrier to Normalize is fallacious for a lot of reasons, but tl;dr: Normal is not Ghost. CAP 29 is almost certainly not going to have 145/130 attacking stats. CAP 29 is definitely not going to have a Moxie equivalent.That leaves us with the concept of us making a mon with really potent STAB, but zero coverage... which is basically just Spectrier. And everyone hates Spectrier. I don't see why we should make CAP29 explore the concept of "make a mon with zero coverage" when Spectrier basically already teaches us everything we need to know, and shows us how unhealthy for the metagame this sort of mon becomes. By its very nature, a mon with no coverage is extremely linear in how it plays and how it is checked, making for an ultimately uninteresting mon.