After much inward deliberation I find myself compelled to make a most respectfully disagreeing with the conclusion drawn by Nat's above post in regards to Zygarde in the metagame. I believe that with the inevitable departure of Gligar impending, Zygarde should be considered as a candidate for a variety of reasons which I will attempt to outline my thinking on below. I am providing copious spacing in between short paragraphs not to lengthen the post unnecessarily but to make the separate points of my thinking more clear and quick for readers to follow.



The metagame has unquestionably changed in the little over a year it's been since Zygarde went through its first testing to be introduced to the tier. The meta back then was vastly different, centering around bulky spikestacking cores, with Miloitc Chesnaught and Gligar all being common sights. The metagame has thus shifted drastically, towards more offensive spikes builds being centered around Roserade, and Chesnaught has been all but dropped from usage and Gligar is now leaving. This significantly reduces the risk of using Zygarde, as teams with common choices that hard wall it are now extremely rare, and the nature of an offensive spikes meta is naturally beneficial to a fast offensive threat of a Pokemon like Zygarde.



Zygarde is not truly best defined as a versatile Pokemon since it can only truly pull off Choice Banded and Dragon Dance sets with little variation. The ability for Zygarde to Dragon Dance, however, is greatly beneficial to the CB set, as it can force the player opposing the Zygarde to stay in for fear of risking letting the Zygarde get a free Dragon Dance up, and ending the game or dealing too much damage for a winning position to be recovered. This means that in addition to weighing what coverage the Zygarde might click, the player must also weigh the chance of a Dragon Dance being set up (ex. in on a 60% Registeel) and must make the difficult choice between risking a free and often game losing DD or staying in on a CB attack and dying.



Of the relative hard checks remaining in the metagame, I would identify Porygon2, Cresselia, and Donphan. These are not completely bad or unviable Pokemon at all, but they do require a significant amount of team support and specialization and are far from ideal choices to be incorporated on any build. Furthermore CB Zygarde has the option of running Toxic as a last move to punish these switchins, though Cresselia and Porygon2's natural passivity renders this far from necessary for the Zygarde player to take advantage of their switchin and make progress. Softer checks I would classify among the likes of Golisopod, Milotic, and Mandibuzz which can switch into Thousand arrows but fold to the right coverage moves and certaintly don't want to switch in with rocks up or even minor chip damage. While they are all useful Pokemon in their own right they can be worn down by clever play, and allow the Zygarde user to still make progress nontheless, without having to endeavor to make a significant amount of prediction. The other way teams generally attempt to control Zygarde is by including an offensive Thousand arrows resist, like Shaymin, and having a Fairy-type, say Scarf Gardevoir, waiting in back to revenge KO it. This is ok verus CB builds, although not entirely disadvantageous to the Zygarde user who is at least guranteed of a trade, but can prove disastrous versus the aforementioned DD sets, and thus I think is not an adequate teambuilding solution revealing the problem of Zygarde.



Why now? I would say that the growing offensiveness of the meta trends in general has slowly elevated Zygarde and that the loss of a very consistent, very common, very usable counter in Gligar gives a boost to Zygarde that pushes it over the edge, especially with secondary options to check it like Chesnaught leaving in the upcoming shift as well. Zygarde is too consistent in its ability to provide value and too imposing in the teambuilder. The metagame has felt crowded with threats for a while now, and I think this is an opportunity to eliminate one of them.



I hope other council members will read this and decide to chime in on the debate. As Nat aluded to there are many other possibly consequnces of the metagame shifts which deserve to be considered as well like Virizion, but to me, Zygarde is the foremost threat which should be addressed.