So after finishing snake there are some thoughts on the metagame I wanted to elaborate on. I touched on some ideas and innovations briefly in the teamdump and elsewhere, but I thought I'd take the time to share some in long form. I'm motivated to do this because I think the discussion surrounding the RU metagame has been stagnant for a bit, and I'm hoping some other snake players and the like will come in and join the conversation. What I'm elucidating in this post are my subjective opinions on the metagame, which I suspect many might think differently from, but hopefully they'll at least spark some discussion.
The status of the metagame as a whole I feel, is one that suffers a bit from overcrowding of threats, and generally forces the builder to either compartmentalize their building with sub-optimal choices, use a specific range of standard team building options, or simply build teams relying more on matchup or elaborate counterplay scenarios. I think top builders in the tier have used all three of the above strategies in recent play, I myself have tended towards the middle, I know players like Col49 have advocated the later most. In my view, most teams generally want to incorporate a Rocker, Hazard Removal, Revenge Killer, Milotic Check, Grass-type Check, Blastoise Check (this is generally several Pokemon combined for non-Milotic builds), and Breaker. Using a diverse range of breakers or expanded offensive core is very hard, as it leaves you vulnerable to the sheer variety of offensive threats in the tier. Specifically, I think the Grass-types, Roserade, Shaymin, and Virizion are overall very pressuring for builds, especially the former two based on there set versatility. Take into account not wanting to have momentum overly stopped by Milotic/ Steel-types, adding a Rocker, and not wanting to be overly Blastoise weak and its somewhat difficult to have more than one Pokemon per build that's not filling a very specific role, if that. Is the solution to suspect something? Many have advocated for as Mega Blastoise suspect. I feel this is not the solution, and if anything, a Blastoise suspect would be harmful for the tier, since it allows more offensive teams some breathing room by compressing a fairly versatile attacker with hazard removal in one slot. Furthermore, I think well structured offensive/balance teams can account for it, without going through ridiculously costly sacrifices in teambuilding. The only thing which I screams out to me as being banworthy in particular is Barbarcle, simply because its coverage slot can essentially reduce the game to matchups, or guessing about baiting the Z, while being ridiculously hard for offense to deal with in many cases and not providing much benefit to structuring the remainder of the tier. In general, the way the metagame has balanced makes it hard to ban or single out any one major thing, so I think the trend of the metagame will remain stagnant for a while, and may continue as it is until the end of the generation. With that in mind, I think many players, as well as myself, have had our minds opened to different options to counter the metagame.
I think two Pokemon that are especially interesting in this lens right now are Florges and Cresselia. The former has received a lot more attention than the later, but I think they are very similar in the way they function in the metagame. Florges has gained traction mainly as being a hard Blastoise counter, but ironically it also serves as one of the best Blastoise supports, especially on slower teams, in my opinion, my being able to viably which pass into it. Further, the combination of Wish Florges + Tech options like Refresh Blastoise allows for dynamic counterplay around Registeel balanced builds to break. With full Defense investment Florges is also a semi reliable check to Zygarde-10% and Virizion, though it is very much a check and not a counter. Notably, certain Roserade sets which lack Synthesis as Recovery and/or a Poison move are vulnerable to being stopped by this Florges. The flexibility of Florges in clericing, hard checking so many special attackers, and potentially defogging (which I am very much in favor of if paired with spin Blastoise) certaintly warrant an uptick in its use and rise from the relative obscurity its been in for most of the generation. Cresselia I think is an underlooked option, which has great viability on offense builds of all things, as it is able to check the plethora of "rediscovered" and old fighting types, DD Zygarde-10% and Flygon, other random usually physical attackers, and can check things like SD Virizion, which the team would otherwise need something like one of the extremely few viable scarfers in the tier to check. On top of this, having Lunar Dance makes this thing such a great asset for offense, which I feel really allows it to play more flexibly, and can give more leeway in selecting the other 5 members as well, based on how much you're able to check in one slot, despite being offensive deadweight. Cresselia definitely could use more exploring.
I think in the long run, assuming there is no radical change to shake the metagame up, top level builds will veer more towards metagame counter teaming and relying increasingly on counterplay. I think most top players have already accepted this, as evidenced by the final snake game with Ajna opting for a Lycandusk + Z Gligar build, which leverages offensive synergy against the metagame in exchange for overall defensive sufficiency. I think the builds I used throughout snake reflect more of standard option, but I think that is growing increasingly untenable given the number of dynamic defensive and offensive threats which continue to be discovered, so I see myself to having to resort to more anti-meta / counterplay based builds. A long result of this trend might be the slow de-standardization of building structures, which has already sort of occurred, but could occur further. I anticipate a lot of teams this SPL relying on diverse multifaceted offensive cores, with relatively low overall defensive synergy, and geared towards checking very specific threats/sets rather than the metagame as a whole. But we shall see. This all being said, I think there are a lot of exciting and underexplored cores/ threats, so I do continue to look foward to building. Other players might have different ideas concerning the trajectory of the metagame, which I hope they'll share. Overall, I think there's still a lot of room for innovation in the tier, and I hope to see it continually explored.