Finchinator I really have to say, I have 0 belief the meta won’t stop rapidly adapting with all the threats left here. Sure Gouging Fire shouldn’t have been banned, but there’s such intense threat saturation that a team that does well one week is bad a few days later.
Quite often I’ll find that a 1800s 10 days ago struggles in mid ladder now. Besides an Archaludon situation, I have trouble seeing anything else getting banned especially because top players love Raging Bolt and Waterpon. This gen has been defined by offense/HO with so many tools, it’s super difficult to keep up with in the builder and with no bans on the horizon (or suspects likely to pass for that matter) I don’t see any evidence of it slowing down.
I think people just need to be patient and understanding; we have had “oh no, oh fuck, this is bad” moments scattered throughout the history of OU.
BW was even worse than this when Keldeo wasn’t banned, SM had plenty of gloom-and-doom when Dugtrio initially stayed, and last generation had so many public fires to put out between Dynamax and the pace of tiering surrounding the new early-generation releases.
I promise you guys that there will be more tiering action this generation — this isn’t a guess or a hypothesis, but there’s no way we are going to go a year and a half of constant evolution without any tiering progress.
I think we have the perfect storm right now: constant releases, Tera is entirely unprecedented, power creep is higher and more varied than ever, and big tournaments happening quickly after releases. All of these things overlapping is going to cause chaos and I think it’s actually a good thing the tier is naturally evolving.
However, there is work to be done. The tier will continue to naturally develop and eventually (sooner rather than later) we will look into the next steps tiering wise, too. You guys just need to be patient and not obsess over recent results.