A History of Banned Strategies in Competitive Pokemon

Surely this adorable little creature can’t be that broken, right?

The Pokémon franchise is no stranger to absolutely broken mechanics. After all, the developers thought it was a good idea to give Rayquaza, a literal Legendary pokemon, a Mega Evolution. Not only did this make it even stronger, but it also allowed it to completely ignore the drawback that most Mega Pokémon have, which is that they must hold a Mega Stone as their item, instead of items that have properties like boosting attack by 1.5x. Of course, Mega Rayquaza was banned almost instantly, but it’s definitely not the only thing that has been outlawed from being used in competitive play. Here, we will look at some other strategies that have similarly faced the wrath of the banhammer.

Baton Pass is a move that has a storied history spanning several years. Normally, when a Pokémon switches out, any stat boosts and drops are eliminated. However, if a Pokémon uses Baton Pass, it switches out with another Pokémon, which receives the previous Pokémon’s stat changes. However, this led to a team style called Baton Pass Chains, where a team would have five Pokémon that would simply Baton Pass between each other, with each Pokémon raising its team’s stats to the moon. Once all stats were maxed out, the final Pokémon would be Baton Passed in, allowing it to basically demolish every opponent in sight. This was obviously very broken, and what didn’t help was that the strategy was also matchup-dependent: either your team had the tools to handle Baton Pass or it didn’t, which led to the playstyle being derided as low-skill and uncompetitive. This was especially the case in Generation III. Here, Dugtrio’s ability, Arena Trap, prevented Pokémon from switching out, allowing Dugtrio to knock the trapped Pokémon out, giving many openings to the opposing team. However, Baton Pass ignored Arena Trap, allowing such Pokémon to switch out anyway and lessening Dugtrio’s capability. As a result, rather than simply being a move used on uncompetitive teams, Baton Pass became a legitimate move used on teams of all skill levels. There were a number of measures that attempted to preserve the legitimate use of Baton Pass while curbing the uncompetitive use, such as one that stated that only 3 Pokémon on a team could use Baton Pass, one banning Pokémon such as Smeargle from using Baton Pass, and one specifically banning the ability Soundproof, an ability that made pokemon immune to moves like Roar, a move that forcibly switches the opposing pokemon out and negates all stat boosts, which had the side effect of  causing some Pokemon which only had Soundproof to be banned. None of these bans could mitigate how overpowered Baton Pass teams were, however, leading to one stricter ban that finally fixed the issue: teams could only have one Pokémon with Baton Pass, and that Pokémon could only pass boosts obtained through one stat-boosting method. Over the next few generations, moves that allowed the user to switch, like U-turn and Volt Switch, emerged, as well as the ban of trapping abilities like Arena Trap. As a result of these restrictions, the next few generations saw the competitive niche of Baton Pass dwindle into insignificance, eventually leading to the move’s complete removal. 

Now, we move on to the absolutely broken mess known as Generation V. Not only did it fundamentally change some game mechanics, but it also introduced some absolutely broken Pokémon and items. First up on our list is the change in sleep mechanics. Sleep is a status condition in Pokémon that essentially makes it a sitting duck, only waking up and being able to make moves again after spending 2-5 turns as the Active Pokémon on the battlefield. The 2-5 turn count is called the sleep timer, which normally doesn’t get reset after switching out. As a result, it was possible to ensure a Pokémon put to sleep could still have an impact by switching them in on a turn the opponent couldn’t do much on, and then immediately switching back out. However, in Generation V, they decided to change this mechanic, and made it so that switching out resets the sleep timer back to its original value. This meant that an asleep Pokémon couldn’t contribute anything for the rest of the game, and would essentially be considered as fainted. Not only did this mechanic make the game heavily luck-based, as many moves that induced sleep were very inaccurate, but the ones that were 100% accurate were essentially one-hit KOs. As a result, the new sleep mechanic was too much to handle and was ultimately banned. 

Additionally,  Generation V was the only generation with an item called Type Gems, which were essentially items that provided a one-time 50% boost to an attack of the corresponding type. This was mostly broken because of multi-hit moves, which are weak moves that hit multiple times in a row. The reason that Gems made multi-hit moves so broken was that it essentially turned multi-hit moves into normal moves that hit multiple times in a row, allowing Pokémon to have a one-hit nuke to absolutely annihilate the counter on the opposing team. Given that many teams only really have one dedicated check to a certain threat due to the plethora of broken Pokémon running around, this could allow some Pokémon to sweep entire teams. Because of this, Gems as a whole were banned. 

Also, Generation V introduced an ability known as Moody, which doubled a random stat while lowering another by 0.667x. This ability was like being the house in a casino: while you sometimes might get debilitating drops to stats you absolutely need, the net increase in stats every time made you more similar the broken Baton Pass sweeper mentioned earlier. As a result, no matter how bad a Pokémon was without the ability, once a Pokémon had it, that Pokémon was absolutely broken. This led to hilarious scenarios, such as Bidoof, a Pokémon with a base stat total of 250, destroying Legendaries with base stat totals above 650 just because of the Moody boosts. Due to this demonstration of how broken the ability was, Moody was banned. 

These are just some of the most unbalanced and memorable examples of the many broken strategies and moves in Pokémon, and I hope this article encourages you to play competitive Pokémon to experience the fruits of this whack-a-mole game with these broken strategies.