+2 Scovillain in sun is walled by what, Dragonite? And then if you run something like Tera Fairy you are walled endlessly by fat Fires no longer have to worry about that, even.
Also I’m just gonna go over every proposed suggestion for Tera restrictions and why I feel they’re inadequate and often completely miss the main issue.
1. Showing Tera type on preview
This just expedites the natural process of players learning optimal Tera types, while also completely ruining any strategies that rely on surprising the opponent with an unexpected Tera type, which overall makes the mechanic a LOT less interesting imo. Imagine if every mon automatically had the effects of Frisk in tandem with their normal ability. That meta would suck, and I feel the same way about this one. If we’re going to gut the interesting part of the mechanic in this way just to appease the ‘Tera is unpredictable and I hate it :((’ crowd, I’d rather just ban it.
2. Limiting the amount of Pokemon on any given team that have access to possibly Terastallize during a battle
If we’re going to impose artificial restrictions on a mechanic without any restrictions in-game just to balance it, I don’t really see what the difference is between this and banning moves on cover legends until they work in OU. This seems overall fruitless, makes the mechanic way more telegraphed (and therefore way less interesting), and we’re still going to have to ban a ton of mons broken by Tera anyway, so like, why?
3. Limiting Pokemon to only using a Tera Type that matches their current STAB
Giving every mon the chance to use super Adaptability is not a fun concept! The only reason I can sorta stomach it with Tera is because as a whole, Tera at least has other effects, but this just completely guts almost every defensive application of Tera, as well as practically every Tera Blast use case not named Dragapult.
4. Banning usage of the move Tera Blast
Most Tera mons don’t even run Tera Blast lol.
5. Limiting Pokemon to only using a Tera Type that does not match their current STAB
Heard this one thrown around too, and while it’s definitely better than option 3, there’s still a ton of mons that are broken by Tera regardless, it’s still super unpredictable and can completely flip matchup charts on a whim, and it’s once again an artificial restriction without reasonable justification.
6. Limiting which Pokemon can Terastallize based on their tiering (eg. no OU Teras)
It’s already been discussed pretty in-depth why this one doesn’t work, but basically this clause would completely flip how tiering works on its head in a very bad way, with mons flip-flopping between OU and UU every 3 months entirely based on how viable their Tera is. Plus, viability of Tera mons does not translate to viability without Tera. Durant was not an OU mon without Dynamax, but with DMax it was a pretty strong contender. Lucario isn’t even close to OU without Tera, but with? Terrifying mon.
7. For a Pokemon to be able to Terastallize, it cannot be holding an item
Another arbitrary restriction. I’ve said why I don’t like those earlier in the post, and this one in particular just feels like we’re trying to mimic previous gen mechanics in a way Game Freak clearly didn’t intend for Tera to. Whether or not that was a good decision is not up to Smogon imo, so a change like this just seems like a bad precedent.
8. Players ban specific Tera types/specific Pokemon from Terastalizing before each game begins
This is SO unnecessarily convoluted, and I have absolutely no idea how or why we would force the coders to have to deal with this. It’s not even close to achievable in online cartridge play unless you use some other tool to communicate with the opponent, and I’m really just unsure why this is getting so much traction.
There’s probably others so if I missed anything important let me know, but yeah, none of these really solve the core issue of Terastalizing in a convincing and in-line-with-previous-policy way, so I really do think Ban or No Ban are the only reasonable options.