When discussing the viability of strategic options in competitive Pokemon, the cutoff between viable and unviable can just as easily be argued to be the most important distinction or the least important distinction. The reasons behind arguing it as the most important point are obvious- to say something is unviable is to say that it shouldn’t ever be used by anyone seriously seeking to win, which is a fairly big deal. Right?
Well, if a Pokemon is bad enough that it’s questionable whether or not it’s viable, even if it generally falls on the side of viability, it’s still not getting used a lot. That means most players seldom see it, and are even less likely to actually use it. After all, if you’re playing to win, it only makes sense to pick the best Pokemon most of the time, which means you’re not dabbling with the Pokemon on the fringes all that much.
What all this means is that while the community can easily come to a agreement on how the top pokemon should be ranked (and regularly does surveys for this purpose), it’s nigh on impossible to do anything similar for Pokemon on the fringes of viability. Everyone has their own opinion on where the cutoff should be, where Pokemon rank in relation to that cutoff, and this is all compounded by the fact that most players are only applying theory in their rankings, due to having never used and seldom faced many of the Pokemon in question.
An extreme example of varying cutoffs would be this post from Teal6, a fairly high level player
I will post a list but I don’t really think the usual Smogon tiering system works for RBY tbh. The top mons are SO MUCH BETTER than the other ones that I see no use for anything outside of like a dozen of them
Teal6
Although that’s not where I’d personally draw the line, that’s still a very valid and reasonable opinion to hold, reflective of a different approach to play that values winning at the expense of experimentation and unconventional strategies.
Testing and Experimenting
That prior point about theory is crucial. In Pokemon, one of the central tenets of rule-making is that nothing gets banned on the basis of theory… aside from the standard OU format arbitrarily banning a slew of Pokemon at the start of each generation for no particular reason (this is bullshit and I will post about it at some point). Despite this aversion to theory, the community has no choice but to indulge in it when evaluating these fringe Pokemon. In this position, people either don’t bother judging them, or do so without actually testing their ideas.
I think this is a real shame in that it’s possible that cool strategies and options get overlooked because no-one tries. I would say that you could go looking for diamonds in the rough, but there’s a reason these Pokemon aren’t used, so maybe it’s best to settle for zircons in the rough. I also personally hate the idea of establishing a hard cutoff in terms of viability, especially when I don’t have adequate experience with many of the Pokemon in the proximity of that cutoff.
Consequently, I’ve decided that I’ll make it a project of mine to slowly progress through experimenting with some of the worst Pokemon in RBY. Although I had other reasons for starting this project as well, this is the core motivation behind this endeavour. I’ve dubbed this the Trashmon Chronicles- you can expect to see more posts from me in this series in the future.
Can We Rank Niche Pokemon?
I’d also like to address the issue of ranking the viability of fringe Pokemon. I believe the current Smogon rankings for RBY omits a number of Pokemon not because they’re totally unviable, but because there’s just not enough information and experience to accurately rank them, particularly among the top players whose rankings were aggregated to form the community rankings. This unfortunately isn’t an easy problem to solve, and it’s likely to be the case that the community’s rankings will forever omit niche pokemon, giving the impression that they aren’t viable.
Having said that, I’d like to try. I think the biggest issue is that the community rankings currently only consider elite players, diminishing the pool of players that might have experience with niche Pokemon. Expanding the voter pool to include the community at large might help, but also the rankings become less reflective of high level play.
In a similar vein, gaining experience with niche Pokemon means little if you’re simply beating up low level opponents. The unfortunate reality is that only the very top of the RBY ladder can be called decent, leaving high levels of play largely restricted to forum tournaments. My best proposal would be to allow a handful of nichemon experts to the voter pool as wildcards. These players would have a lower barrier of entry, but would have to have replays showing wins with pokemon not currently ranked or that are considered niche. You could even go so far as to treat this as a separate project.
As I said, this isn’t really a problem with a good solution, and truthfully I’m not fully satisfied with that proposal either- I’d see it more as a rough idea than anything else.
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