Late to the party as usual haha



First off, regarding the whole suspect test as a whole. Full disclaimer that this is my own personal opinion and not that of the entire council: I like that this new system that doesn't use COIL allows for more people to vote, but at the same time I feel like it was too easy this time and didn't provide enough of a challenge to people looking to vote, even with a mediocre W/L. Of course, this is taking into account the fact that using GXE would make things less dependent on an early streak. Right now, the system itself works well, so the best course of action to take imo is to adjust the GXE requirement here and there until we hit the sweet spot where we provide enough of a challenge such that you'd need a pretty good threshold of playing competence to get reqs without cutting off 90% of the community, or as some like to call it, being "elitist". I obviously can't speak for the TLs, but I do hope people don't think it's a slight towards them specifically if the GXE requirement or something else does change next time, and they can't qualify as a result. To me, a single suspect test really isn't enough to judge whether what we have currently is the best. I'd also like to point out that the GXE of a lot of people this time tanked because of the ladder's update issues for 2 days, so without it, it's likely that there'd be a lot more voters and the current voters would've had much higher GXEs (I took a glance over people's records corresponding to it and a lot of those really didn't add up under normal circumstances).



As for future suspects, I'm more or less on board with testing stuff in the tier right now as opposed to freeing more things. If anything came the closest to warranting a suspect imo, it'd be Azumarill. I don't think it's broken, but there's enough talk about it combined with how borderline it is to get me to agree with taking a look. Not much else to say there.

___



For Mega Slowbro, as many people have brought up, it's not a bad Pokemon at all, but the opportunity cost as a Mega Evolution made me hesitant on using it on a team. Plenty of times I just wish I could use something else. If I'm not building specifically to utilise it, I'd rather use regular Slowbro tbh. The standard CM 2 attacks set is massively overprepared for. I'm talking teams with like 2 Toxic users and a Breloom or something, so while it's not bad now, there's literally no way to tell how viable this set is outside of the suspect. CM + Iron Defense + Rest was the fun set I used early on, and it basically destroys a lot of balance teams that rely on Toxic to beat threats like this. I'm talking teams that make use of some sort of Empoleon + Ground-type core (primarily Gliscor). The issue is that against most offensive teams, it's really hard to get the proper initiative going to the point it becomes threatening. Even if you manage to get up a boost or two, the Rest turns leave you incredibly vulnerable without more boosts. You also get walled by Amoonguss completely, but honestly, you'd wanna run minimum two Amoonguss answers if you're using this set or some sort of lure like All-Out Pummeling Breloom to KO it after a little bit of damage. Against stall, you can probably annoy it a little but overall it isn't gonna break the team, and if it's Pyukumuku stall, your Slowbro is gonna get PP stalled out of Rests.



I tried using Mega Slowbro on stall too. As Pearl mentioned, not being able to use one of Mega Aerodactyl, Altaria, Steelix, and Aggron is a huge pain, since each of those provides a ton of utility, more so than Slowbro imo. I also found that using Mega Slowbro makes it hard to fit a Wish passer on the team without sacrificing the ability to deal with some massive threats. Alomomola is by far the best Wish passer you can ask for, but having both that and Slowbro on a team is asking for trouble, especially with either a Quagsire or Pyukumuku too. Granted not every stall team needs a Wish passer, and I'm not the best stall builder ever, but it's highly appreciated especially with mons like Amoonguss that would have to rely way more on Regenerator, and running Synthesis on it can be a pain when it's already pretty strapped for moveslots in this meta. I will say that Mega Slowbro does ease pressure from physical attackers better than Alomomola does, but the issue with that is that I found myself not really willing to Mega Evolve at times because Regenerator is just that good. For the record, I didn't use CM but a Scald, Ice Beam / Counter, Toxic, Slack Off set; Slowbro is pretty damn good at spreading Toxic.



Overall, I just think Mega Slowbro is a really good mon if the player knows how to be smart with it, since it's not something that should be winning super easily. With that same thought, a smart player with a decent team should not have issues dealing with the different sets since the countermeasures aren't hard to fit on a decent team. Having a subtly versatile mon isn't anything new to the tier anyway. I don't mind being proven wrong though since I acknowledge its potential, but I'm voting unban for now.