Competitive Battling Spotlight #23: More Pokemon Bans

        So the OU metagame has an interesting road ahead of it, now with the recent ban of two top-tier threats. Thundurus, as expected, has been voted to Ubers alongside a quite unlikely (in my opinion) partner, Excadrill. The two received a 73.24% and 69.01% respective vote from the Smogonites. Other suspects this time around included Deoxys-S, Dragonite and Volcarona, all of which I was quite surprised with being considered for the ban. I think it will be interesting to see how all these things play out in the coming months and whether or not they will return as suspects for the next round.
    
       With two of the most dominant Weather abusers gone now, it is difficult to say what exactly will happen to the OU tier.  Excadrill was arguably the Sand abuser of all Sand abusers, so I think it's safe to say that the general structure of most Sand teams will change notably. Offensive threats like Terrakion and Landorus will rise, while Gliscor and Ferrothorn will probably stay as they are in usage, especially considering that the former was one of Excadrill's top counters!
       
        While Sand may see a few changes implemented within the next month or so, I don't see Rain teams really changing at all now that Thundurus is gone. Surely he was one of the most deadly Rain abusers out there, but he really functioned well on any type of team, meaning he was not only limited to abusing Drizzle. For this reason, I don't think too much will change for standard Rain.

        What Thundurus's absence does mean now is that Tornadus, recently degraded to UU, should be making a comeback to OU soon, considering that Thundurus's outclassing was one of the largest reasons for Tornadus being so rarely used.

      Lastly for the Overused tier, I think we shall see the dawning of a new day for Sun teams, considering that Rain and Sand dominance hugely outclassed them previously. With Drill and Thund gone now, I think Ninetails and friends will see a little bit more prevalence in the tier. This also makes Tentacruel perhaps the best Rapid Spinner now, fearless of being EQ'ed by Drill.


       Things got a little changed up in the RU tier recently as well, as Yanmega and Venomoth were banished to the first ever BorderLine 2 tier, making them viable only in UU and above. This means drastic change for the youngest of the tiers, having lost a lot of its members in the last few months [no more Cress, Umbreon, Golurk, Blastoise...]. But it's probably safe to say that it was only a matter of time before these two bugs were gone as well.

        The fact that now just about every tier has been shifted greatly really makes for a fun and exciting time for Black and White competitive battling. Undoubtedly, a slew of new threats will shine, and with a little centralization in the upper tiers gone, I am excited to begin team building for any of the aforementioned metagames. For a list of the new and Updated Tiers, click here.