ADV OU Historical What-If

[Disaster Area]

An interesting fact from the past of ADV OU is the fact that Jirachi & Celebi only ended up in ADV OU because the owners of Netbattle decided they wanted them in OU; had the owners not decided that, it's very possible that Jirachi & Celebi would be banned to this day. It's a story for another time that I think if they had done the same with Latias (minus Soul Dew), it would be OU too... what I wanted to ask, however, is, what do people think the ADV OU metagame would look like with Jirachi & Celebi banned? And secondarily, do you think that, if that were the ADV OU we ended up with, we would decide at some point to test them? Would they seem broken in the metagame that lacked them?

 

[Cowboy Dan]

Losing Celebi would have a pretty huge impact on the metagame I believe. For one it's such a strong defensive pillar in the tier so with it gone there would be less diversity in the checks for electrics and waters. I think HP Grass would rise in usage on electrics as a big component of hp ice usage is having something to do solid damage to Celebi with. I also believe usage of special walls like blissey would go up as with celebi gone, it would be one of a now significantly shorter list of things that can switch in to modest toxic zapdos. Snorlax would also get better thanks to both its ability to check electrics and waters as well as the fact that one of its best walls is now gone. I can see venusaur getting a lot more use as well. One of the main things holding it back right now is that Celebi tends to just be a more effective option for a lot of teams.

On the other side, currently a lot of teams have to make sure they have some way to break celebi as it can be really hard to kill but with celebi gone this is no longer necessary. As a result the high prevalence of hp bug that you currently see in adv would most likely disappear in favor of better options. Things like flygon and dugtrio would drop the move all together and even tyranitar who likes the coverage for claydol would probably opt for hp ghost if it wants to cover claydol (100% chance to ohko gengar at +1) and would be more likely to use some of its other 4th options like double edge, ice beam, hidden power grass or taunt. All of these changes would of course have a huge ripple effect so the actual state of the metagame would be difficult to gauge.

Jirachi is a little bit harder to say. Despite the fact that it is an incredibly strong pokemon both offensively and defensively I don't feel like it influences the metagame the way celebi does. The loss of yet another pivot for special threats makes blissey even harder to pass up but its niche as an anti-choice band measure against things like aerodactyl and cb mence would just get distributed among a number of pokemon. Offensively one of jirachi's big strengths is that a lot of teams don't specifically prepare for it and that it often takes multiple pokemon to properly account for all of its sets. As a result of this I don't believe removing it would drastically change the usage of what's left in the tier. I think the main impact of its loss would be that there are a number of teams that are 6-0'd by certain jirachi sets but are otherwise viable and they would become more reliable.

 

[Disaster Area]

I've just made this metagame playable on the PP server btw. It's called [Gen 3] OU - Celebi & Jirachi

 

[Disaster Area]

Would Exeggutor increase in usage? Celebi being gone makes other sets more viable (it gets a lot of cool stuff like Wish, Explosion, Sleep Powder, Leech Seed... but it's definitely quite a lot of steps below Celebi)... if Dug stops running HP Bug in this meta then since it couldn't be trapped so easily maybe it becomes a viable option (outside of sun teams where it's already viable but niche in regular OU)?