The 2023 National Dex Pokemon Showdown Controversy
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2025
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www.smogon.com... ---- The death of Natdex AG
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Great video detailing the strategy in full
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play.pokemonsh..., a simulator. Simulators are a great way to play and practice without having to go through the process of actually building your team. 6v6 singles, the most popular format in the west, is played on Pokemon Showdown with smogon rules. You can also play on Pokemon Showdown's VGC Ladder. In fact, most vgc players test their teams here before actually commiting to building it in game.
Revive Cats is the most diabolical strategies ever. If the cats don’t kill you, the insanity will.
Liepard got the funbro spirit
@@pessoadefinitivamentenorma8282 you only get to revive about 96 times
@@jmooroof1769 99 times.
@@pessoadefinitivamentenorma8282 Funbro has the legendary status of being banned from Anything Goes but revive cats got Anything Goes banned. Hard to say which one is stronger.
The cats won't kill you.
Insanity isn't a back up plan, it's THE plan.
I love how Liepard shows up now and again across Competitive Pokemon history to ruin everything with broken Assist strats. The best part is where we, smogon and gamefreak forget it exists until it comes back again with another broken strategy in a later gen. It is truly the only dark type who earns that typing.
And Bisharp because he is the best Pokémon ever created and has that unspoken swagger that many modern Pokémon yearn to portray
@@liamthecrusader5056 Swag ain't a crime. 😎
Revival Blessing, however, is a crime.
@@iantaakalla8180 Of the war variety.
Competitive pokemon is dumb and the game should not be built around it
Void cats, dive cats, and revive cats now forcing a new tier, a feat on the level of mega rayquaza. Truly, cats are the most terrifying creatures.
cats are fuckin' menaces, no matter the medium
The most evil of the evil types.
What is void cat ? Why not void dog ?
@@35.tucongtan64 liepard and purrloin using dark void(darkrai's signature move) with priority, calling it from smeargle's moves, in 2 player vs 2 player doubles
To think I had one on my first playthrough team an later boxed it lol
One thing you also didn't mention is that revive cat teams are actually unable to beat each other, as their dittos can copy their opponent's Liepards and thus have infinite assist pp. So even if you just accept that it's the meta strategy and use it you'll be forced to tie against opponents also running it. And speaking from personal experience, countering it isn't as simple as slap e-speed on something and win. I also got it to rank 1 on the ladder at some point, and I was consistently beating teams with 2 or 3 e-speed users. It genuinely became an unplayable tier.
Scarf G-weezing
@@fractalisomega9517 the GOAT
Cry about it ditsbrain
@@fractalisomega9517 It’s… It’s genius…
Natdex is turning into the Vintage/Legacy formats from Magic the Gathering. Once you have 20+ years of content available at once, people find the most ridiculous combos that the designers didn't plan for.
Or Yugioh if the banlist wasn't updated frequently
At least there’s a functional game in Vintage and Legacy
Revival Cats is more dominant than Delver or Shops have ever been
@@jacobtietjen2099 yeah, this is more like if vintage didn't have the restricted list and you could play 4 ancestral recalls or some shit
@@seki108 The Tyrant Neptune becoming broken after its ability was considered one of the worst out of the legendary planets is still funny to me.
@@MasterArchfiend Honestly it wasn't even the broken part of that combo, Independent Nightingale was.
I think they should make National Dex Anything Goes an unrated tier, like they have unrated Random Battles. That way, if you end up facing an opponent doing annoying bs, you can just forfeit with no consequences
That would also get rid of the matchmaking waiting time.
Reminds me of how Pure Hackmons ladder got axed in Gen 8 because Eternamax Eternatus was so hilariously broken that it was almost literally the only mon used in the format, along with multiple other legal exploits like HP editing that made it completely unplayable.
My question is why Eternamax Eternatus was even allowed.
@@AedraRising it's not even meant to be played as.
@@AedraRising Pure Hackmons is a metagame about ANYTHING that can be hacked into the game
Eternamax eternatus is a pokemon in the game, therefore it can be hacked into use, therefore it is allowed into Pure Hackmons
Nice Aika pic
Balanced Hackmons supremacy
Imagine being a Gamefreak employee, finding out last minute that you accidentally made Revival Blessing callable by Assist.
"We deleted Assist in the game anyway. This won't cause any problems."
No one did it - it allows to pull moves by default. Mostly because the ban was added later on, after Prankster was added and Liepard was given Assist. The only reason the move is even problematic.
@@mjm3091 It's a dev oversight for a move that got deleted.
I'm glad he mentioned that revivecat isn't a totally braindead strategy. I think it's pretty boring, but there's definitely a lot of strategy to it.
I have the same opinion on stall. It's pretty boring to me but you can definitely tell when someone skilled is using it versus someone that just clicks, aka brain dead stall
@Boble Yee nah its also in the battle, any high ladder team would have some way of beating cats that the cats would have to play around
Revive Cats is incredibly unfun to play against, but I can't deny the skill that went into its meta development, it's really quite incredible
Don't give them more confidence, you're a loser with too much time on your hands if you use revivecats
@@mrschrubelhupfyay6397 i beat people on ag with cats that had 3 extremekiller arceus. Even counterplay isnt super consistent
This is what I find hilarious about noobs running to AG to fill a team with Mega Rayquaza and Arceus… Anything Goes means *Anything Goes.* If you didn’t like stall or cheese strats in OU, you’re REALLY not gonna like stall and cheese strats in AG.
Let them learn the hard way.
And I'll happily be over on the temp6t channel to laugh at it.
@@paulelderson934 You actually watch that mf lol 💀
@@paulelderson934 if you watch temp your elo must be under 1000😂
@@KobeLoverTatum as opposed to yours you’re so generously proving? Oh wait you’re not. Don’t write checks you can’t cash.
Towards the end people were also playing 2cats variant of revive Cats, which had the added element of getting suddenly switched to 2 actual offensive pokemon who would then suddenly kill you when you mess up a switch 100+ turns in.
If I had a nickel for every time Assist Liepard dominated competitive, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?
Three. Void Cats, Dive Cats and now Revive Cats
@@wherewiiwentwrong what about assist whirlwind
@@sheeplol2161it turned out that was a showdown error, didn't work like that on cart
@@Mijzelffan thats copycat whirlwind
assist whirlwind works exactly like that on cart
What I like about National Dex is that it approaches what pokemon battling in the anime would be like.
"There's actually a lot of nuance in the strategy."
I've heard the same about the Tearlaments mirror in Yugioh. That Banlist was pretty cool.
I've never wanted anything as dead as I've wanted Tearlaments.
spoken like someone who has never played a tear mirror
theres a reason every top player without exception says how enjoyable and skill intensive the game became that format
And now our format is....dogshit
I hate single deck metas as much as the next guy but just because a majority of decks are unviable doesn't mean it isn't skill intensive, it just means the format is unfair to the greater playable deck list, which ofc Konami doesn't want to invalidate most cards in its boosters
@@seltzer666 tbh konami does want most cards it prints to be unviable, thats why the boosters are set up the way they are
its good for them if u buy many boxes just to get a kashtira core
the prime example of this was in THSF when you got one brionac per 5 fucking boxes and nekroz was very clearly the best deck
Nat Dex Gen 8 was really cool. It was fun seeing Cinccino annihilate Calyrex-Ghost and fun to figure out to beat all the OP teams running around.
Agreed, I do natdex ubers with supposed 'shitmons' to challenge myself on low ladder and it genuinely makes me so miserable seeing people scold me for it when I'm just trying to have fun using unique strategies I come up with against a very powerful tier
Elo bandit coming up with strats so good they get anything goes into trouble
People really be thinking elo bandit created these strats 💀💀
@@watery2211 people already knew about the strat BEFORE THE TIER WAS A THING lmao
@@watery2211 he didn't make the strats but he did optimize and popularize them
temp6t also played around with it really early
I didn't invent Revive Cats. I just popularized it, pushing it to the top 25 most used Pokemon on ladder at every rating.
I used to play NatDex AG in gen 8, was pretty high up on the ladder and I would occasionally see cool strategies or stuff like that. But the higher you went the more it was basically just Nat Dex Ubers because that's what would consistently win.
However in gen 9 from what I'm hearing the games are just 100 game atallwards against lipard and that's not fun, I understand that they would want to ban something that takes the fun out of playing pokemon. Although I would be against banning "Overpowered" strategies, because that's what the metagame is supposed to be about. Part of the fun of playing Nat Dex Ag is that you could have 6 Arceus in your team and customize it. The mega gengar and Calyrex bans seem like competitive descisiosns that have no place in a for fun meta while the liapard revival blessing is just abnoxius.
I hate the fact that mega gengar is banned, like, a shadow sneak from marshadow kills it, i don't see how much powerful it can be, but i got it once in my team and it sweeped and killed a max spdef scorvillian
@@maximilianomartincastrocor8883 it shadow tag that why it ban
@@kono_dust_da8180 oh
@@maximilianomartincastrocor8883 It can get a free kill on any team due to Shadow Tag, and Encore combined with Shadow Tag allows it to set up with Calm Mind and sweep. Plus Destiny Bond and Perish Song shenanigans.
Shadow Tag and Arena Trap are uncompetitive and broken abilities.
Absolutely agree. No one is playing AG for competetiveness. Otherwise Evasion and Moody would be banned. It really feels like whoever made the AG ban list decided to sneak in those extra bans while they were doing it because they didn't like them. Then they killed AG so people would be forced to play their preferred version of AG Ubers. If so many people wanted AG Ubers there wouldnt be these hypothetical long wait times. They knew for a fact lower level players didn't want AG Ubers and it was only a collection of upper level players that wanted it. So a select few people got to force 95% of a community out of their game mode to play one they would like more.
No. National Dex AG, was supposed to the only place to use the ubers since the current uber tier only has a small handful of ubers.
Honestly, what I would really like to see implemented is National Dex Doubles, since I feel like many of the broken strategies in the current NatDex format would be easier to counter or harder to pull off, while also giving rise to newer strategies that are impossible in the current generation. One combination I'd love to see is a doubles combo of Primal Groudon and Koraidon.
Natdex ubers was made to ban all the strats that made the game unplayable for everyone while still retaining the chaos of AG but now they started banning other stuff. As broken as mega gengar is I can't be the only person who doesn't want it to be banned, it was a cool pokemon after all, and it's not only that too there are other things
I mean you have to understand that mega gengar is one of those strats that makes the tier unplayable. For example, you really can't click a set up move at all because mega gengar comes in, shadow tag traps you, encores you into set up, and it sets up sub and nasty plots just to win the game. It wasn't fun.
@@Rose-ez7yn So what do you expect the players to do who actually liked the chaos of Anything Goes, then? If the goal is to rejoin into one tier to avoid splitting things further, then you need to make decisions that don't make the split even worse. That's why there's only one ladder and not two.
Gen 9 Anything Goes exists, but National Dex is where the true fun always was for a tier like that. It's not truly replaceable by either tier.
Mega gengar is legal in gen 6 and 7 ubers. In my opinion the nat dex council has always been too willing to ban things for a tier that’s not an official format
@@Rose-ez7yn A game mode on Showdown with no ladder is essentially killed off from any sort of development or ease of play, which is exactly what a casual format needs to function.
If the idea of ranking is an issue, then you can make it an unranked matchmaking game.
Frankly if it weren't literally exclusive to Showdown then I don't think there would be a problem, people could just play on the actual game, but that doesn't exist, so all this has done has made it unnecessarily difficult to find other players.
@@Rose-ez7yn Speaking as someone who's now been playing competitive for a decade, I think the *last* thing you want to do as a competitive community is discourage casual play and people's ability to use crazy stuff in its own environment. "Tough luck" is an unnecessarily brutal standpoint to take for something so simple. Smogon may be competitively focused, but Pokemon as a whole is not, so I think this is insanely foolish and makes Smogon look more elitist than it already does to the outside. I know from experience that as a whole it isn't, but that won't stop people from thinking it, and given this slap in the face I wouldn't blame them.
Players making up National dex ubers in retaliation of cancer strats feels like the No Homers revenge club from the simpsons.
“Dive and revive”
-Liepard evolutionary line
The fact that trubbish is the best counter to this strategy is very funny to me.
wait how so?
@@firewall5189 it runs curse, gunk shot rest, and recycle with leppa berry giving it infinate pp to out stall the cats, but what makes it better than other mons like garbador is that its ability sticky hold makes it so that its leppa berry cannot be removed by thief.
@@rixrobinit doesn’t have sticky hold as an ability
@@ZeroWinger
"Aftermath
Stench
Sticky Hold"
@@ZeroWinger why not check this before commenting. 💀
I would have thought a team of cats reviving would be called "Nine Lives".
Tbh I wish more resources would be invested into Natdex by the community as a whole. I would love to be able to play Natdex OU, UU, RU, NU, and PU, tbh
We finally found the reason why cats usually only have 9 lives
I’m still sad about this. Smogon just disregarded an entire community. I know it’s trash but how hard I it to keep up.
Nat Dex AG is my most played format and holds most of my teams but almost half are banned for one reason or another (M-Rayquaza, Baton Pass, Dupes etc.) which is just unfair to me and others who just wanted to have fun.
Smogon hates fun, and want everyone to be miserable tryhards.
Sacrifices of the few and all that.
Imo they should have actually tested whether having both ladders up would have resulted in both ladders having too long wait times. Like I don't doubt that it would but it's the only chance players like yourself had and you guys deserved at least that.
@@metawolf987 you guys like losing to that dumb nonsense?
@metawolf987 This is true, even today in natdex ubers
As one of the more high ladder "honest" NDAG players (I didn't use Tera Shed or Revival cats), you had to try and have something to counter the two. I personally loved using Ting Lu since it could just spike stack and then I just whirlwind enough to where the cats kept getting chipped and then they lost. Tera Shed is similar since I brought status/phasing moves to ensure that I was somewhat safe. Sucks that the ladder had to go but we still go strong in NDUbers 🙏
Honestly it was the peoples fault. It was fun until people ruined it. What was a sandbox is now without the sand and thus unenjoyable and was avoidable as those use strategy likely were playing for points so it just became unwanted overtime
I think I played you, I remember a ting lu team in high ladder. I used a bp team with alomomola
So instead of wasting you're times with revival cats you waste they're by phasing for 12318173 turn ?
Damn what a crazy meta
@@SpookySpectral yeah. i never viewed the tier as being really "competitive" in a sense. but i wouldn't blame the people because they just found a strat that made them win a lot of the time. that's just the nature of a ladder. whatever is the best strat will be used and abused.
Tera Shedinja was fun to play with or against.
As a person that played national dex ag in gen 8, it's was very fun. It’s actually what I spent most of my time on, I did do ou sometimes; but getting to use anything was so fun! I hope that the Pokémon showdown players can switch to national dex AG gen 8 (if that’s a thing)
Gen 8 anything goes is the closest thing
This is just stupid, it doesnt make sense to remove a tier that has a lot of players and that it was never meant to be competitive in the first place
Something common that a lot of people are discussing is splitting tiers, but that misses why ladders get removed. There's only a limited player base on Pokemon Showdown, & creating too many ladders in reality just creates a bunch of dead ladders.
NatDex AG got so tedious that people stopped playing it. It's already a niche tier, so splitting it up, or even having both it & NatDex Ubers at the same time, effectively splits the user base & makes both ladders far quieter.
This is also why you never find past gens' lower tiers or Ubers with permanent ladders. You would split the playerbase of an already niche meta & never get games. When those past metas, or even the gimmick metas, get features for a single month, you get a lot more activity on them.
Natdex AG always has a low ladder tho, them casuals love it
2:45 _"That's what you signed up for when you started playing Anything Goes"_
Precisely. All this horrible and annoying imbalance is ultimately the fault of the game devs for programming in alot of these mechanics and features in the first place and it ends up being broken. If you want a balanced game that rewards creative teambuilding, go play something else or stick to the lower tiers of Smogon cuz Pokemon ain't one of those games.
I remember how a lot of cards that "Yu-Gi-Oh!" Players hate are basically floodgates, cards that limits how much the player can play like Skill Drain and Vanity's Emptiness. Even less effective floodgates that does not completely stops a player can be annoying, like cards that banishes cards that normally are supposed to be send to the GY. It's to the point that most Yugitubers rejoice when they learn that some particularly annoying floodgates get forbidden (A.K.A.: Banned), as can be seen with Mystic Mine and Barrier Statue of The Stormwinds.
Basically, what I'm saying is that strategies that completely stops the opponent on their track is not fun, and kills the desire to play the format/game. I don't think they should have removed the ladder from Anything Goes, and instead just ban unfun strategies, like Revival Blessing Liepard and Tera-Electric Shedninja. It's would make the meta more healthy while also allowing more casual players to just have some fun, especially since I think those are just the few problem cases that were mentioned and makes the format unfun.
Both YGO and Pokemon have to have incredibly big and detailed banlists to reward skill. Seems both ended up being marketable and beloved but are unbalanced messes with the meta.
The issue is that we're talking about AG here. It's called "Anything Goes" for a reason, and any bans (beside endless battle/desync/softlock) inherently go against the concept of the tier in the first place. If you want to ban something from the tier, then the tier is no longer AG by definition, and if we're banning things for being uncompetitive/broken, then we may as well play Ubers instead.
Yu-Gi-Oh still lets you play without a banlist what Smogon is doing is removing a ladder that lets you play this format unless you want to play it casually in custom rules for the 5 people who play that format competitively.
@@emmetstanevich2121 Well, technically, AG is already not AG by definition, since Smogon does not allow you to use endless battle strategies. Another example of letting, well, anything be allowed being a bad idea and killing the meta tier is Gen 8 Pure Hackmons. In it, people used Eternamax Eternatus and a bug that allowed it to only take 1 damage from one type of attack. One is already difficult to take down, but two with different builds almost makes it impossible to win if you do not know what you are doing.
The two strategies I asked to be banned are not as bad (especially Tera-Electric Shedinja), but they are still difficult to take down if someone is just going in casually, and more importantly, unfun to play against if you don't really have an out.
Natdex AG getting removed is pretty lame tbh, its AG, it doesnt need a council to function cuz theres no need for tiering. NDUbers was absolutely needed, but thats no reason to murder AG. The tiers arent the same thing by a longshot(Natdex with strong legendaries doesnt even work too well for AG since the most dominant strats barely even use legends), AG is crazy shed and cat shenanigans, Ubers is an actual metagame
Something notable against shed is also hail, which allows you to bypass shedinja switching in for as long as its up as no1 runs tera-ice shed
I swear Liepard and Riolu are basically the Tyrants Neptunes of Pokémon.
I've been playing AG formats for about three years now. Out of the two gimmicks you mentioned, the only one that posed a real problem to me was the revival spam one. Most of the time you always want to run ways to deal with setup (which is pretty popular on the tier), so running Mold Breaker or Teravolt to deal with Unaware BS isn't uncommon. The problem with making an "Ubers" version of NatDex AG is that it further restricts the players experience by catering towards the whiny part of the playerbase, with unnecesary bans such as the Calyrex and Miraidon bans. That's my main gripe with that solution. Forcing infinite matches was already banned with a special clause, they could have done sometging similar for the Revival Blessing + prankster combo.
I guess that back in the days of Funbro, it was a one-time thing, and the generation before that (which was 4) had nothing that was just broken beyond relief. Now, it is a given that Tera Electric Shedinja exists (which at least is easily countered by Legendaries), that Assist Prankster will exist, and Dynamax and all the other broken stuff in Gen 8 made people far too accustomed to banning stuff that was broken simply because after various voting the broken things were banned.
They should've at least kept ND AG, instead of removing it pretty much entirely.
it is still there tho, its a challengeable format
@@ClasIsMid he meant keep the ladder
He told you about the argument to remove it at the end of the video.
@@spookyscarylamppost3431people don’t listen, apparently lol.
@@spookyscarylamppost3431 Yes, and you missed the problem of why it's controversial before that, evidently. There is no "fun, fuck around" sandbox meta now, and people genuinely liked that. Check out Elo Bandit's most recent video to find the outpouring of players who miss the tier, and the claims of why it was a dumb decision to axe it entirely.
Not splitting the niche of a niche ladder makes sense! However the problem lies in when the council for a tier makes decisions that immediately break off the largest part of the tier, the part that wanted a fun meta and didn't give a shit about competitive integrity. I think there is a place for NatDex Ubers, for sure, but it's no replacement
I freaking love National Dex. It lets me pick at the only handful of pokemon I actually LIKE from the last couple gens while still getting to use the mons I actually love.
Revive cats seems like it wouldn't be something TPC would have enabled calling revival blessing with assist if revival blessing were in the same generation
I already know it's in the code for the record, I just think it's likely vestigial code because moves likely are assist enabled by default I'd think.
I imagine some gen 9 moves don't have the flag set, which would then suggest that at least a passing thought went into whether or not it should be callable. that's the main way I'd see them feeling confident in the decision to let Assist call Revival Blessing.
@@VenoMantis The only new Gen 9 moves that aren’t callable by Assist are ones the player can’t ever use themselves.
Also Assist can't be called in gen 9, which makes the idea even more ridiculous. Because just because something is flagged by default - it means it should be adapted to Showdown as it is.
I fear no man. But that thing
*Gen 9 Natdex AG*
It scares me
R.I.P Gengar-Mega
Revive cats really weren't broken, they were just annoying. In high ladder games, I rarely saw the team and didn't even bother bringing counters. It's a cheese strategy that has easy counters.
Being annoying honestly seems worse than being broken in AG. I mean, the point of AG is using broken stuff.
It's not broken, but that's also not the point of the strategy.
My favorite counter has GOT to be trubbish
Can assist call imprison?
@@MisterSleep1123 yes
You mentioned that you wouldn't talk about revival cats in more details since it was derivative of elobandit's video, but this in of itself is derivative of his more recent video. It also frames it that a majority of players were looking for bans/changes which isn't the case per his video
His recent video was pretty overall biased in his favour.
@@SeriousStriker yeah, he didn't ven invent the strat. Probably just said he did so he could make it another gimmick and gain fame for it.
elo bandit was very biased and many people said it was a salt video or smth. Like elo never invented revive cats, it was always there
@@quimartolas12 he... never said he made the strat? he just did some optimization/theorycrafting with it.
Of course I did not invent Revive Cats. I never claimed to do anything other than popularize it.
Keep it as AG, sure revivecats are annoying but the whole point is it's not a competitive format, it's a dumb casual sandbox that you can jump into. Turning it into ubers introduces a banlist that is already getting ridiculous because it's not just removing the two strats that made AG unplayable but banning all the fun stuff
The banning of Mega Gengar to AG leaves Mega Salamence the undisputed best Mega of NatDex Ubers.
A morbid curiosity in me wants to see how silly a hypothetical "natdex AG any ability" format would be.
Scarf comatose sleep talk revival blessing Pawmot... like revive cats but with no move retriction on the other mons 😱
a general trend i keep seeing in competitive singles is that the more freedom there is in how you can build your team in a tier, the more downright bullshit and restricting that tier becomes. natdex aa ag would just be the pinnacle of that (outside of hackmons) and be completely unplayable beyond the lowest level where there's still casuals lol.
Those cats had way more than 9 lives.
augh I literally just added Espathra to a team and now I have to change it back to what it was. If only laws were so quick to ban stuff in real life that is a nuisance and a threat to you - and no I'm not talking about flamingos or ostriches.
the thing i doesn't understand though is despite those controversies, they never hold any sort of voting system or something in that regard. We know it will be controversial, and the insiders that never played the metagame even slightly removed the entire thing.
Honestly i felt like a tier with only tera shedninja and revive cats banned and nothing else is banned (like bp, evasion, trapping) would be a reasonable solution because from what we saw from gen 8 natdex ag, without those 'cheese' the metagame would probably be playable
a misconception about how funbro is banned while revival cats weren't is that funbro force the game to not end by intention, while revival cats is trying to win. It is not to say revive cats are healthy for the metagame, but funbro targets to let the game goes forever, whose is much worse because while it takes strategy to 'trap' something, the target isn't to knockout something or to even win the first place, it's unlike 'matchup fish' teams whose purpose is still to win, just that they are using a uncompetitive strategy to win. Funbro isn't making the game uncompetitive or unfun or even unplayable, it is making the game based on whether if you need to quit or not for the other to even win. Thats why endless battle clause is in AG.
It's nice seeing cats having plot armor for once
Play a Yo-Kai Watch game or watch some Doraemon anime sometime. Perhaps some Garfield Super Pets or Tyson's Meowth from the Pokemon anime.
@@DrCoeloCephalo Doraemon doesn't count, he is a robot
Natdex AG was the last bastion for me using mega Rayquaza, and liapard took that from me too.
Can’t believe GameFreak accidentally created something worse than Dive Cats.
I think switching to Ubers is probably sensible if the majority of players want it. I do think “banned from Ubers” should be a very high bar - if it were up to me, it would just be excessively luck-based strats like evasion getting banned. Mega-Ray, Zacian, Calyrex-Shadow, Mega Gengar, Miraidon, Koraidon? GameFreak designed powerful stuff, that’s what Ubers is for, it’s not supposed to be balanced.
To be fair to GameFreak, Assist isn't legal in gen 9, and I'm pretty sure all moves are callable by default, unless flagged to not be callable. GameFreak simply forgot to add a flag that would literally never be relevant in gen 9 (unless Assist comes back in a DLC.)
Then again, Sleep Talk is also able to call Revival Blessing, and that is a move that exists in Gen 9, so I'm not sure if GameFreak cares all that much about it.
@@emmetstanevich2121
The revaroom moves from the Team Star Leader battle is not callable by assist, so no, it’s not callable by default, it’s an intentional decision.
I mean, in this case Game Freak actually didn’t create this problem considering that Assist doesn’t exist in Generation 9 so obviously they wouldn’t have to take it into account. This is 100% just a fundamental issue with Smogon.
I also think Mega Rayquaza needs to be usable in an least some tier. And I need to use multiple arceus
@@spookyscarylamppost3431 Or maybe just regular time cut behavior.
I'm a pretty active NDOU player, and it was definitely interesting to watch this process happening on the national dex discord server. People had discussed National Dex Ubers last generation, but Dynamax actually helped keep a lot of the most ridiculous stuff in check. Dynamax isn't possible to add into a format with tera on showdown, so the basic idea of NDAG was already being challenged pretty heavily by coding limitations.
Another factor, that's a bit less interesting, that factored into NDAG losing all traction was how tera interacts with some very powerful Ubers. Specifically, Calyrex shadow becomes impossible to check once it can get stab on draining kiss.
So basically, Gen 8 NatDex AG was pure luck in that because of the specific gimmick of the generation checking other gimmicks, while Tera is far too fundamental a change plus Gen 9 having Revival Blessing in the first place?
As a National Dex AG enjoyer, what happens in AG atm makes me sad. Tera Electric Shedinja ruins it
“Shedninja”
Ah yes, the return if shed-ninja. No shedinja here
They should have just bite the bullet and make Assist not call revival blessings. IDC about purism, the problem is in all intents and purposes invented by Smogon and very likely an "I don't care" moment from GameFreak.
Assist ain’t even in the game so normally the two wouldn’t interact. Pretty sure if they did coexist it would probably be uncallable
@@thejuic3b0i64 indeed, because of 3v3 Singles. There was already a stall problem in that format, being a big reason why recovery moves now have only 8 PP max.
Pretty sure that goes into Sleep Clause territory. The fact you have to practically mod fhe game to get more balance just shows what a broken mess it all is.
@@DrCoeloCephalo I mean, in this case it’s not even the game that’s broken, it’s Showdown itself that caused their own issues by believing that unused vestigial code is god.
@@DrCoeloCephalo Who cares? The format ONLY exists on showdown and with smogon therefore they should make the rules.
Well, I'm still mad because ND AG is gone, but with all the context is understandable, I just hope GF makes revival b uncallable by assist at some point so the tier can return in the future, otherwise is permanently dead and is sad
Assist was removed from the series in gen 8. There’s about a 0% chance GameFreak makes balancing changes to a move they deleted because an unofficial simulator wants to use it but also doesn’t want to make unofficial balance changes of their own.
@@TheMistermastermario but moves still have assist calls for it, the torque moves cant be called but revival blessing can? it can also be called by sleep talk so seems odd
@@darthhydreigon820 seems like by default it's callable, so if a move is not manually set to be forbidden then it can be called.
They instead removed Assist which effectively means no moves whatsoever can be called by it in the actual game.
So it's only a 3rd party problem and as such the 3rd party will have to find a solution
@@eclipseeffigy maybe... but the torque moves arent.... so why go through the effort to remove it from torque moves but not revival blessing, idk i guess they didnt anticipate this or smth... like roar was callable by assist in gen 5 and chainable, maybe they just overlooked it
@@darthhydreigon820 Well, the torque moves (and the starmobiles in general) aren't meant to be used by players (kinda like the opponents in pokestar studios,) and according to bulbapedia, they aren't able to be called by ANY other move (such as copycat, mimic, instruct, etc.,) so it seems they simply had all their "exclusion" flags set, including the currently unused ones (no sense in checking which ones you're setting if you want to set them all anyways.) For Revival Blessing, I assume GameFreak didn't have problems with it being called by other moves (such as mirror move,) and any exclusions they do make would be for interactions that they specifically take issue with, which probably doesn't include a move that got axed last gen.
I think even if both ladders existed, NatDex AG's userbase would eventually all switch over to NatDex Ubers, *except* for the Shedinja and Liepard (and other banned 'mons - Calyrex, Mega Gengar, etc.) players. If they want to have a ladder all to themselves, I say why not? If people want to try finding a new meta-defining strategy that can beat these teams, why not provide a ladder wherein they can do that?
I don’t see why both can’t coexist? Like have AG for the shitters doing whatever, and Ubers for the competitive players?
Liepard has had such a hilarious competitive career.
It's a shame False Swipe Gaming don't talk about unnoficial tiers, they haven't done a Liepard video yet and this would be a fun inclusion
i miss the national dex in pokémon games
It's not a pokemon game unless it has one
Make nat dex AG something without a ladder but something you can still queue up for to fight random people. This prevents the dilution if the competitive pool at a top level while still giving a space for casual people to find random matches.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other, it only has to be one or the other for people higher up on the ranked ladder. That’s where the long wait times get really atrocious.
Casual players were probably never going to get up there so them being removed from the pool doesn’t impact the time.
I don’t think that last argument makes sense. If Natdex AG is such a bad meta then you shouldn’t expect to split the players all that much. You’d just end up with a very sparsely populated AG ladder and a much more populated Ubers ladder. If that’s not the case then apparently “people want it” isn’t all that true.
as someone who played Natdex AG while it still had a ladder, it basically got less and less fun the higher you got on it, since you see less people messing around with funny strategies (personal one i used was miraidon + alolan raichu double teaming everyone to oblivion), and more about people wanting to win, so of course they are gonna bust out the strats with the highest chance of victory, which of course was either tera-shedinja or revive cats
As some1 that played the tier and iirc peaked at 8th on ladder, playing the serious players was the fun part, few things in mons were less satisfying than e-speeding through the cats once theyre all chipped down
Honestly there should still be ladder for natdex AG, it's quite literally called "ANYTHING GOES" for a reason?
In my opinion this is the occasion to implement "complex bans".
For example no balloon on shedinja and no team with assist where only one move can be called.
Accuracy clauses is still fine but keep the rest.
It is AG. Where there are no bans, it is no lomger AG if stuff are banned
@@watery2211 yes, I was talking about Ubers. There's no need to ban shedinja
ideally there should be ladders for both tiers, but if it comes down to it i'd rather natdex ubers. if we just have natdex ag then when things that are slightly too op for ou get banned if you wanna play a format with them you're also forced to play with gimmicks like no species clause and baton pass, revival cats, etc
Indeed
Smogon just handled the situation very badly, most ppl dont even care about competitive at all and national dex AG had A LOT of players, giving these 2 facts it doesnt make sense to be removed
@@watercrystals9744
Showdown is mostly played by casuals and ppl that for whatever reason dont have a switch ,most just simply dont care about competitive, if casuals are gone showdown is mostly dead
@@watercrystals9744 You severely underestimate people's unwillingness to actually have to interact with a person online. That fact alone is the reason why people are dead wrong when they say ignorant shit like: "You can still play a 6v6 Single on cart". No, in practice we cannot, because 100% of the playerbase wants to avoid having to directly ask for a battle online, and would rather just use the automated matchmaking system, which is currently called "Battle Stadium".
Even on Showdown, most players are not up for casual conversation during a battle. The last time I saw actual PvP interaction on Showdown was when I took a peek inside Gen 7 VGC back in the day.
The game data is wrong, it's blatantly obviously filler data. Every single move is 'callable' by Assist except for enemy only moves, including moves that their equivalents have never been able to be called by Assist in the past. It's entirely arbitrary.
Shedinja is one of my favourite pokemon and it feels so good but also so weird to see it in a banned list with the likes of Mega Ray and Calyrex Shadow.
i think NDAG should remain a tier
but people gotta realise that it is anything goes. apparently smogon devs got a lot of complaints about how “broken” certain strats are in ag… but if you care so much, just play regular natdex, or even better the newly formed natdex ubers
its either you allow every broken strategy into AG, or none of them into Ubers
NDAG was secretly a cover for big stall™️??? 🤯🤯🤯
Some ways to counter revival cats:
Whirlwind+hazard stacks, because they can't run a recovery move because of assist.
Extreme speed sweepers like mega ray and arceus normal are great too, but it's only reliable if you have a way to setup substitute.
Toxic+whirlwind. Same deal with the hazard stack strat, but a bit difficult to do so.
Bulk up sash marshadow with shadow sneak. (Actually, any strong and fast priority mon can fralda with them)
I disagree that having both AG and Ubers would split the player base. As someone who doesn’t care about the NatDex Ubers, I still would’ve played NatDex AG, and I don’t think I’m alone. You’re not looking at a pool of players who would be divided by having two formats, you’re looking at a player base that will only play one and not the other, and therefore removing one removes all of those players immediately. RIP revivecats.
I doubt that. Now that they removed Nat dex AG, most plays will probably go to either Nat dex UBERs because they want to play with legendaries, or just AG, instead of just not playing the game entirely.
Cats have 32 lives
You forgot to mention the part where one jackass from smogon shut down the tier without warning/discussion, and locked any discussion on the matter (quashing the main venue for the inevitable backlash). This was so dirty in execution that I simply cannot respect that decision.
Kris did not say “We decided to…” nor mention any group of people involved with the decision to straight up close a tier. In any normal situation, you say who the parties involved are making a big decision like that. (if they exist)
While councils are known to have private discussions, Smogon generally tries to maintain some baseline level of transparency on their forum. Saying “We got together on voice chat and decided X” is still more transparent than saying “This is happening now. Just deal with it.” which is what happened lol. No transparency at all. No open discussion allowed before or after the fact *on THE forum that is regularly used to discuss policy changes* etc. That’s just bullshit.
@@loupandsnoop Who cares?
Anyone who wants to play NatDexAG.
@@loupandsnoop That's not a whole lot of people. Many people, from your casual players building Ash Ketchum teams, to some of the more highly respected compeitive players, where all complaining about how unplayable the tier was. There is simply no reason to keep a ladder up for a metagame that has little competitive value and has a playerbase size that's falling like the Hidenberg.
@@largin386 It's Anything Goes. There are no bans.
They missed out on not calling this strat 9 lives
I’d like to add that supreme overlord gets boosts even if you rez a mon
I am for having both nat dex AG and Ubers, even for long queue times, on showdown, there are ladders for OU of every generation (BDSP OU is still on the ladder but LGPE isn't), random battle of every generation, metronome battles for gen 9, and even just in gen 9, there are 20 options (14 solo metas and 6 doubles, metronome battle not included in these but gen9 OU is).
There are more metas than mentioned, so with all of that choice there are surely some of them with longer queue times than nat dex AG and Ubers had if they coexisted
Has anyone on the Smogon dev team thought to make a separate ladder button?
Like, 1 button for unranked, and 1 button for ranked?
Moments like these is when you realize that GameFreak was onto something when they said that Dexit and movexit were inevitable for game balance purposes
That's what banlists are for anyway which is something they continue to use otherwise you get formats like VGC 2016.
I mean ultimately that's what a banlist is for. If they truly cared about game balance in their competitive format when making that decision, then they would do that instead of axing certain moves/Pokemon/whatever from the code. I do get the idea you're implying, but I don't see it as a reason to defend the decision when you could approach the problem from a better angle.
Hell, that's why the regional dex metas existed, even in Sun/Moon when Bank was thriving day 1.
@@WishMakers
_"We TOTALLY cut monsters and skills for balance purposes. Please believe that and ignore the fact we resell such content as DLC."_
*Glances at VGC 2016 usage stats
Gee, if ONLY there was some kind of list of banned options to prevent a meta from ending up like that. It's not like they EVER used such a tool in later or previous years.
The ironic part is, there are still more NDAG games then UU games usually in ND. It's just OU players complaining how they can't use their Lando Ts
The tier is literally called "Anything goes", what were people expecting? Balance?
Elo Bandit is a genius
Custom Game exists, so if you want to mess around with your friends, you don't need National Dex AG. I vote for keeping Nat Dex Ubers instead.
Take a shot every time he says “shed-ninja”
I was 7th overall in gen 8 national dec anything goes. I was 23rd in national dex. I was sad when it was banned but realized Ubers was a thing and am now 97th in Ubers at first I was against it but now I do prefer this it favors my play style and is much more fun to play.
The leopards have stopped lying
"You can't fix the issue by removing Revival Blessing as a callable move. That would go against what the game data is telling you."
Um... yes you can. The game data doesn't let you play with everything from every generation ever in the first place. It's something that was created for fun because you can even though you can't do it in game... so of course you can remove elements that make it less fun, since it's not supported by the games in the first place.
Not to mention Smogon modifying how Sleep and Freeze work with special clauses due to how the mechanics in the cartridge game suck so hard.
@@DrCoeloCephalo Exactly what I'm talking about. I wanted to reference that, but decided against including it. I have a bad habit of typing up miniature books if I don't restrain myself.
@@DrCoeloCephalo Except when they tried to implement freeze clause as a universal smogon clause, everyone went ballistic calling it a moronic decision because it diverts from game mechanics. Now it is ok to divert from game mechanics???
I'm ok with the ladder going to just ndu as long as ndag isn't removed completely because of it. I still want to be able to mess around with friends in ndag, but if there is a reason they wouldn't be able to keep it even as just a non-ladder option then so be it I guess.
If you want to mess around with friends on nat dex AG. You can always challenge them to it. It is just ladder that is gone, not the gamemode.
@watery2211 yeah I know, I just mean I hope they don't end up completely removing natdex ag entirely because it no longer has a ladder.
Inside the game code Revival Blessing has the assist tag enabled. Are all the new gen 8/9 moves enabled? I'd be curious to know, because if nothing has it since the move was deleted, then it's likely just all moves are assist enabled by default, and there's no reason to differentiate them now.
not all, the torque moves for example do not and while those are unobtainable they directly show off that theres some reasoning behind not changing revblessing to stop working with assist since its technically intended
Everything except for enemy only moves. I'm strongly against using placeholder data given it also enables Assist calling moves with precedent that it wouldn't (the new special Protect move). The decision to use it as is was entirely arbitrary and never how GF would have implemented it if they kept it.
@@ClasIsMid The torque moves are NPC-exclusive, and they can't be called by ANYTHING (including instruct, encore, etc.) They probably just have every flag set, because why would they specifically not set the assist flag?
natdex AG shouldn't have been removed. if you hate the tier then don't play it simple. the entire point of Ubers was it was a banlist but AG was made in order to make Ubers playable once the power creep was getting ridiculous.
now stuff like mirai, gengar mega, and caly are unusable in natdex play. awful decision
Looks like someone didn't watch the video, ndag was so hated that everyone abondened it and let the ladder Rot and die so they can play ubers
@@oofjeff3735 Sort of like what happened to Gen 8 Pure Hackmons, but not nearly as extreme.
What if people wanted to play with pokemon unusable in other tiers without having to face rev cats every game?
Also why weren't there this much outcry for Pure hackamons. Both were deemed too unplayable, therefore removed and replaced. If you truly cared where were you during PH's removal?
@@oofjeff3735 there was still a playerbase, low ladder never died
I just to build a boxing team. That’s all, but everywhere I turn it just seems impossible for one reason or another.
Oh well. I can still daydream.
I remember reading nat dex AG player numbers and retention were just ABYSMAL. People literally did not want to play in it.
Lot of ppl played it, was fun
@@Ultra289 You can't argue against the evidence ig
@@i_like_chomp6382 what evidence?
@@Ultra289 On the smogon forums/analytics, what's your evidence that people enjoyed things like revive cats or Tera Shed?
@@i_like_chomp6382
You do realize most players dont use the forum right?
Funny thing is that problems like this, which are inherent to new mechanics and attacks, is one of the benefits to the dex cuts and removed attacks. Some of these tactics are so obvious and broken to face that GameFreak would never have put in a move like Revival Blessing alongside Assist or Terastalization alongside something like Shedinja. Those mechanics are only possible because they cut Assist and Shedinja.
I mean yes, in theory they could have come up with some solution beyond cutting, like making Revival Blessing not a viable Assist target or making it so Shedinja can't Terastalize to Electric with some BS shoved into the game to "explain it" in world. But solutions like that would have also had outcry and would require fixes for every big issue like that, while cutting them let's them save time to put development time in other areas, even if they still need even more time to develop the games than they're getting.
I liked toying with teams in Nat Dex AG, figuring out ways to counter strategies I ran into, including revive cats. The whole point of the format was to have a format where things could run wild without restriction after the dexit, wasn't it? Freedom to make any team you wish and test it against whatever your opponent came up with, regardless of how strong it was, or what generation. It was a tier made for uncompetitive play, with no clauses and gimmicks of all types that people would want to try out. Removing it is senseless in my opinion, and saying that 'having both NDAG and NDU would 'split the player base further' is an incredibly weak counter argument that disregards that the player base was already so split up across the various categories that were already being played. Adding one more format would not have significantly split the player base in any fashion, and saying that it would result in much longer wait times to get a game is likely overexaggerated.
tl;dr, my personal opinion is that removing NAT AG was a bad decision that while made with good intentions, screwed over a portion of the userbase.
While ND Ubers is more popular, and should be prioritized as THE Nat Dex format to play, ND AG should still exist as an active ladderable thing specifically as the ultimate “we do whatever we want within cartridge rules” tier. It is unfair that that sort of creative play is considered bad just because it leads to the same battles, and while ReviveCats and Electric Tera Shedinja are the meta, it is fun in a sense to see what specific counters you need for those thing that will now perpetually exist.
was going to write a comment with my thoughts, but then i realized that yours already brought up the points i was thinking of and probably did so better
@Boble Yee its not just a straight majority on all counts tho. A majority of the competitive players wanted it, sure, but the casuals thatd make up most of the ladder mainly play the tier for being AG and not Ubers, so I doubt itd be a majority of people playing the tier at the start, much less at the end when the people playing the tier would be the people playng the tier for what it was
So whats the problem? You say its not a competitive mode and good for you because they only removed the ladder but you can still challenge people to an NDAG match.
@@eclipseeffigy NDAG was always a ladder format, it was a way for casuals to play with whatever they wanted without having to care about rulesets restricting them
it'll suck to not have a natdex tier without species clause anymore but I can see why ndubers is more important
If only that scovillain used fire fang 6 generations ago… iykyk
much love two Elo bandit and his contributions XD