The votes are in:Thanks to all who participated in this suspect. You can view the vote results at https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/usum-uu-suspect-process-stage-10-1-voting.3650248/post-8129097 And so, with Mega Sableye gone, I think it's time to ask a very important question:This is a very important question, and one that the council has been actively discussing for some time. We are in the final year of SM UU. I'm of the opinion that we've had a great run, and I'm very happy with the tier overall. But that doesn't mean that we just stop here! This is our last chance to get our house in order. Pearl and I have been talking a lot about the state of the tier, and we have some ideas of how to move forward from here. However, there is one big elephant in the room that needs to be discussed before we can move on:Scizor has been a major part of UU since day one, and since those early days of UU Beta, it has remained more or less the top dog (bug?) of the tier. Through countless metagame shifts, at our tier's most stable and at its most volatile, Scizor has always been a dominant threat. Nor has it been without controversy either; there have been several "ban Scizor" movements. And, frankly, there's a lot of good reason to ban it. It has cemented itself as the best 'mon in the tier for some time now, with incredibly high usage. It is nearly impossible to reliably counter, and probably warps the tier more than anything else. Swords Dance sets in particular are extraordinarily threatening, with bulky offensive Iron Plate and Buginium Z sets on the rise at the moment. There are very few 'mons with the ability to just completely turn games around in the way that Scizor can (Mega Altaria is probably the only competition it has on that front). It has some counterplay, but it's limited enough that I think there's a very good case to be made that Scizor really is just broken.So why haven't we tested it? Well, the reason is simple: a lot of us feel that broken or not, there's a pretty good chance that Scizor significantly improves the tier by its presence. Banning Scizor would have significant ramifications, ones that could potentially destabilize the entire tier. There's simply too much power creep to reliably check all the top threats defensively short of playing full stall, and there is nothing in the tier that compresses checks to powerful threats more than Scizor. Right off the bat, Mega Altaria is already borderline banworthy in many eyes, and the sole thing holding it back is Scizor's 40% usage rate. Of course, broken checking broken is never a great argument and if Alt is that threatening than we can always look at it too, but follow the logic even further. What happens to Terrakion and Latias if Scizor and Mega Altaria go? Terrakion has about three reliable switch-ins total, but the fact that it's checked by the omnipresent Scizor and can potentially give MAlt setup opportunities provides a real opportunity cost to its use. And for that matter, how exactly do we reliably check Latias with those gone? Already Latias has the tools to break through most of its "counters" and has proven unphased by trends like Scarf Krookodile's meteoric rise last year. What happens when we remove two of its best offensive checks?Basically, right now the 'mons at the top are balanced on the edge of a sword. It's precarious, but ita balance. And so, a constant question that the council has been attempting to address is: has the balance tipped? Has Scizor reached the point where it is so centralizing and so threatening that it no longer has an overall positive effect on the meta? That's a really hard question to answer, but an important one. And with the release of Sword and Shield likely coming in under six months, it's a question we have to answer soon.So as things are, the council has developed two potential paths for how to move forward for UU. One path involves suspecting Scizor and if it gets banned, focusing our last months on properly developing the metagame in a post-Scizor world. The other path involves making the formal decision to retain Scizor, and looking at hacking away at a couple of things on the UUBL list (and potentially reviewing some other problematic threats in UU). While we've been discussing this on and off for some time now, I've set a hard deadline offor us to come to a formal decision, because whatever we decide will take time to properly implement. As the community, I'd love to see your take on it as well.