Mega Mawile: The Rise and Fall of

Preface

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word mediocre as "of moderate or low performance", which aptly and accurately summed up Mawile's competitive capacity before the worldwide release of Pokémon X and Y. Around twelve years ago, when Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire were released, Mawile held a unique status as one of two pure Steel-types, the other being (the much better) Registeel. Unfortunately, Mawile's subpar base stats doomed her to the NU tier, where she was fated to sit at the bottom of the barrel. Even among her NU compatriots, Mawile struggled to maintain a semblance of competitive relevance, having only the ability to pass Swords Dance boosts backed by Hyper Cutter, which prevents the lowering of her Attack stat, to her name. Neither the ADV to DPP nor the DPP to BW transitions helped Mawile become more competitively relevant in the upper tiers. In fact, these transitions only served to make Mawile even more competitively irrelevant, with BW introducing Klinklang, another pure Steel-type that would further leave Mawile in the dust.

This would change in the transition from BW to XY, when Mawile hit the mother lode, gaining the newly introduced Fairy-type (with an actual physical Fairy STAB move in the form of Play Rough) and a Mega Evolution with increased bulk, Attack, and the ability Huge Power to boot. This was a significant development, because the previous strongest Pokémon with Huge Power or a functional equivalent was Medicham, whose base Attack of 60 paled in comparison to Mega Mawile's massive base 105 Attack. However, even with those changes, Mawile still did not truly reach the competitive apex due to the presence of more dominant Mega Evolutions, such as Mega Gengar, Mega Kangaskhan, and Mega Lucario. After a few months of metagame development and the banning of these more dominant Mega Evolutions, Mawile finally accomplished what she never could before: competitive dominance. Still, Mawile's stint at the competitive apex was not to last, as Mawilite was banned from OU with a 78.2% super majority on Sunday, 24 August 2014. Left with no other relevant niche in OU, this article will serve as a reminder of what made Mega Mawile too much for OU to bear with.

Mawile's Qualities

Just by glancing at Mega Mawile's base stats, you may be wondering why Mawile was banned from OU. Yes, her base Attack, which sits at a modest 105, is nothing noteworthy. What truly made Mega Mawile a force to be reckoned with in OU was her Mega forme's ability, Huge Power, which took Mega Mawile's modest base 105 Attack and catapulted it to what essentially was a titanic base 259 Attack, in addition to her concise movepool, which gave Mega Mawile just the right moves she needed to shake up any potential counters. This gave Mega Mawile the opportunity to modify her moveset to best match up with what her team needed, which made it much harder for opponents to deal with her without seeing a few moves not named Play Rough or Sucker Punch, moves which nearly every Mega Mawile carried. This doesn't even account for Mega Mawile's Steel / Fairy typing and 50 / 125 / 95 bulk, which, when combined with access to Intimidate in her base forme, made it extremely easy to find setup opportunities and extremely hard for opponents to KO her without sacking a few Pokémon in the process. With Intimidate, Mawile could switch in on a resisted or Choice-locked physical hit and get the Attack drop on it. As this more than likely would force the Intimidated Pokémon out, this was one way Mawile could create opportunities to Mega Evolve and wreck faces.

While this list of positives may give the impression that Mega Mawile was flawless in design (and she was, in a sense), Mega Mawile did have one noticeable flaw. Although Mega Mawile's access to Sucker Punch and potential Sticky Web or paralysis support could be used to offset her lack of speed, Mega Mawile's middling base 50 Speed stat meant that she would have to sacrifice quite a bit of her respectable bulk to outrun certain notable targets, such as Clefable, Scizor, and Tyranitar. In addition to this, Mega Mawile's typing, despite being a major contributor to her overall ferocity, made her vulnerable to several prominent Pokémon in the OU tier, such as Heatran, Charizard, Garchomp, and both Landorus formes. While none of the aforementioned Pokémon appreciated tanking a Huge Power and potentially Swords Dance-boosted Sucker Punch, all of them had the ability to force Mega Mawile out with their powerful attacks.

Why Mega Mawile was Banned

To put things bluntly, Mega Mawile's huge power (no pun intended), combined with all of her other positive traits, made her a massively centralizing force in the XY OU tier. With her Huge Power-boosted attacks and precise movepool, she had the ability to throw off otherwise reliable checks just by changing one or two moves, which allowed her to make the claim of having no hard counters, a claim very few Pokémon were able to make. One of the most common examples of how Mega Mawile can beat her usual checks is her match-up against Heatran. While Swords Dance variants are usually at a disadvantage against Heatran due to its superior Speed and access to Will-O-Wisp, which gives Heatran the capacity to work around Mega Mawile's Sucker Punch, Mega Mawile can turn this match-up on its head just by using Substitute over either Swords Dance or a coverage move.

In addition to Mega Mawile's ability to throw off her counters, it turned out that her one flaw, a pitiable base 50 Speed stat, was not exactly a flaw at all because she could still beat a few notable targets just by investing in her Speed a bit. Moreover, Mega Mawile could use Sucker Punch to get around the faster Pokémon that threatened her. As such, the only semi-reliable checks to Mega Mawile were those Pokémon that could tank a potentially boosted Sucker Punch and/or Play Rough on the switch and threaten her with a OHKO, a task that very few Pokémon in OU could perform. Even then, using revenge killers that met the aforementioned criterion could fail if the Mega Mawile user opted to run Substitute over Swords Dance, forcing players to run more than one Mega Mawile check on their team.

Postface

You could treat this article as a bit of a memorial to one of the strongest Pokémon to have ever graced OU with its presence. Alternatively, you could take this as an analysis of what potential combinations of traits can mark a Pokémon as "too good" for OU, and make your own comparisons to other threats that are still here in the tier. With Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire on the horizon, maybe one day we'll have an opportunity to retest Mega Mawile in OU to see if she truly deserved the ban. Until then, thank you for reading this article, and have a nice day.

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