High Usage vs Brokenness: The Great Tusk & Landorus-T Phenomenon 

i don’t think it’s really reacting to anything. it gets knock off and spin plus an amazing ability/speed stat for a tank that allows it to both set up hazards and clear them without caring about ghost types. at most it’s a reaction to gholdengo making hazards hard to clear

If you look at Seismitoad in early gen 8 OU that’s another great example of this

@@fulltimeslackerii8229 But.. it IS reacting. Gholdengo is only the start. It's a reaction in general to how unmanageable hazards have become with a lack of removal. It's a reaction to powerful threats that are hard to check WHILE doing its job as a hazard controller and offensive threat. You say "At most it's reacting to Gholdengo making hazards hard to clear" as if that's the only Pokemon causing problems in the hazards department, when anyone who's actually played gen 9 knows it's more than that. Edit: And even if, theoretically, Great Tusk was only appearing to deal with Gholdengo, it'd still make sense why it's taking over the metagame. Well, it's not taking over the metagame. Great Tusk is making the metagame actually playable. If you ban Great Tusk, who do you comfortably resort to?

yveltal in Gen 8 Ubers seems like a good example of this

​@@titaniumtogekiss Don't forget Necrozma Dusk Mane

So Gen 2 Snorlax but Snorlax is still broken

@@laprasrules12 there still weren't many good fighting moves

Yeah definitely Gholdengo would most likely be even higher usage than it is now

And people use Quagsire and Ditto if said meta is unhealthy.... because the only purpose for those 2 is to matchup-fish the overpowered threat

Especially the pex

I hate lando and great tusk tbh but its just cause i see them every game and it just feels repetitive not cause i think they’re overgeneralising, on the contrary they are kinda decentralising pokemon very essential for a healthy metagame, i dont have to like them but i understand why they are crucial.

Lando T is definitely a problem in lot of metagames, it doesnt neccessarily win the game or sweep multiple guys, but you are certainly playing around it a lot, its fast, it can learn good moveset, it's got an amazing typing but most annoying to me, is that it removes the inherent weaknesses from a lot of the builds that run it, which I think is just very bland. Just a PSA to everyone: there is no creativity in running Lando T, set rocks, u-turn into you weather setter, then smile (yeah, I play lot of BW and yes I also do this and no it's not clever or groundbreaking when I do it).

things that are broken are like chien-pao and possibly even dragonite

The broken stuff may not have the most usage because they only do one thing really, really well.

@@shreyanshbehera8550 dragonite feels extremely restrictive and unhealthy for the meta tbh, salt cure is also cancer Tera pushes these two over the edge, i feel like tera is the issue with making broken pokemon even more broken while being extremely unpredictable

@@Bazzi69 I see

Temp6t posted parts of this exact replay on Twitter. I can still hear the edits exactly as they happen😂

I would assume the reason behind not using a clearly broken Pokémon more is because, well.. even if a scene is competitive, people still play games to have fun, and perhaps the broken Pokémon in question isn't the fun they want to have every single day. It could also be team style restrictions mixed in with that. Maybe you want to run a Stall team, and the broken 'mon doesn't fit on Stall. Maybe you want to run Hyper Offense, but the 'mon doesn't do that great on Hyper Offense. Maybe people just don't want to use it for some reason, it could just be that despite the fact that it's broken, it's still not fun to use. It's a reasonable assumption that, when Chi-Yu was legal, there are plenty of people who refrained from using it simply because clicking Flamethrower and Dark Pulse over and over again wasn't fun. There's also Garganacl, who while I won't say is broken (since I don't know that, of course), it is clearly a defining threat in the metagame, but Stall is a notoriously disliked playstyle, and Stall is the way of the game when using Garganacl. Perhaps a better example is Toxapex, whom in earlier generations people FIERCELY believed was broken, and to this day still do (it isn't, lol), and yet it wasn't quite the top of the charts in usage rate.

Well, if I had to give my two cents, the clearly broken stuff may not fit on every team, but they are unmatched at their specialty. Flutter Mane isn't going on stall, but no one would argue that it was balanced.

I'm actually on a pixelmon server rn that's kinda running into that issue rn lol. Anything popular gets banned for the next week. Lando rilla and melm are now gone and I'm running rain. Next rain is probably going. It's kinda a mess.

Could be!

You can check out Pokeaim and Jimothy Cool, they cover SPL matches on live streams every week and even if you miss them the VODs are always available. They provide valuable insight so you can improve by watching them as well.

Snorlax is broken in gen 2 but nobady wants to live in a meta game without Snorlax he is a necessary evil. Tusk is just a flexible moon like lando t. They do many things for one slot and that great for teambuilding

Treads actually beats Gholdengo better than Tusk does. Treads is really only scared of Focus Blast from Ghol while any non-Thunderbolt special attack is doing a heavy number to Tusk. Tusk is preferred because of its combination of offensive and defensive power. Even if you run max Defense Tusk you still have a very powerful Body Press while Treads wouldn't be hitting very hard at all if it couldn't invest in Attack. Tusk also has an easier time switching in

There are better pokemon for the role in Ubers and above, like Yveltal, Primal Groudon, and Necrozma Dusk Mane. The conversation around Lando and Great Tusk is an example of survivorship bias. If Lando and Great Tusk were the best, they would probably be Ubers

Or TingLu

And fairies, and offensive flying types, but hey, home looking pretty good

I could be wrong but I think Tusk has more usage. It's ranked A+ in viability whereas Lando's only ranked A, but I could be wrong

Landorus T has 19.4% usage (2nd most used) and Great Tusk has 14.31% usage (6th most used) in NatDex. They're similar but different enough to make good cases for using either.

@@darienwest4748 Thank you for looking that up for me. Do you know where you can find the data for it?

@@nicholaswoel-nogueira4074 Pikalytics, its a site that shows usage stats for VGC and Showdown formats.

Which flying type, gliscor? Tornadus??

@@newjumpcityjosh9333 Lando-T is the biggest one, he completely walls Tusk while now also being able to set up some nice hazards on him or threaten to sweep and KO Zapdos will return and not only punish Rapid Spin with Static, but also just wall him out entirely unless he runs Rock coverage which he really doesn't want to do I could feasibly even see Tusk drop to UU depending on if we get better entry hazard removal I guess he CAN run Ice Spinner actually, but still, those aren't moves he really wants to take on the set that's the reason he's so dominant in OU to begin with

@@newjumpcityjosh9333 kanto & galar birds, Braviary-Hisui + 8 forms of genies

@@whomgod420 knock off sr EQ spin. I could see ice spinner become a viable option over knock when zapdos and lando get released and obv zap can’t roost on Tusk safely.

@@Azujay I’m curious to see if Landorus-I will be banned again with that LO shear force set.

LandoT doesn’t see over 20% usage in BW or ORAS. And it’s not close to 50% in SM even. You’re misled if that’s your criteria and you think LandoT qualifies

you can just say you don't like what snorlax does to gsc ou

@@mb778_ thats true

By that logic yveltal would've gotten banned before calyrex-s in gen 8 ubers, usage cannot be a measure of brokenness since broken pokemon always have less usage than their counters.

@@vorpal1174 you have not read my comment, have you?

???

@@josidfin hold on, let him cook

Just another Landorus-T malder, move on everyone

the lack of a x4 weakness really do make it like that.

@@fulltimeslackerii8229 but it’s also doesn’t have the ground immunity, toxic, and is a lot more specially frail

@@isaiahmcgirt5832 great tusk doesn’t have intimidate like lando but lando lost toxic anyways

Great Tusk is a staple on offense and offense is far better and more common than stall. We have banned a lot of Pokemon who have forced stall (see: Flutter Mane and Chi-Yu forcing things like Blissey). This is just an incorrect take

The pokemon with 133atk is stall? You morons always find new ways to embarrass yourselves

HELL YEAH FINCH IS MIKE TYSON 💪💪💪

cope

@@josidfin but finch, don't you get it you're mike tyson

@austin gray The bird's not gonna notice you, little bro.

You really have to go after something that has nothing to do with his capabilities don't you?

Whether or not a Pokémon is boring or not is opinionated. Just because you dislike something's presence in the metagame does not mean everyone does. And even if they did, it's still not a good reason to take action on it.

@@Avatapaxn you see, that’s just what I can’t understand. why would you insist on maintaining a metagame if everyone hated it? that is just absurd in my mind

@@lasagnapig630 I don't have an answer to that question. But there has been very few times where everyone hated a metagame, if at all, and this isn't one of those cases. People don't find the OU metagame as it is boring. Much less the entirety of the population that plays it.

We haven’t had a metagame everyone hated in ages. We survey people every month or two and every single time since the middle of generation eight (early generation eight wasn’t great), it’s been enjoyed and rated favorably. If you dislike it, you should participate and make an impact yourself.