Upon further reflection after reading more of this thread and talking to other members of the VR council, here are some more of my thoughts:



A lot of people have put forward opposition to the "banning dynamax on Ubers" approach, as it would make OU policy affect how we handle our tier. I don't personally see this as a huge deal, since at the end of the day we're not bound to OU policy even should this be implemented, we can do whatever we want and ban/unban anything we decide to (we're independent from OU policy to the point that we can decide when and when not to allow OU to affect our policy decisions, if that makes sense). However I do get the sentiment and this solution does seem dirtier to me after thinking about it.



A solution I've thought of and recently expressed here in this thread by Melee Mewtwo is to simply have an initial banlist and to expand it as time goes on through suspect testing or some sort of consensus by top players. I actually think this could be the most elegant solution if we want to salvage the dynamax mechanic, and it's not some sort of unprecedented thing since this is essentially what OU does when every new generation comes out. Essentially, a list is made every new generation and OU players decide which mons to quickban, usually including all of the cover legendaries and some other legendary or just otherwise generally very strong Pokemon. Dynamax would basically act in the same vein for ubers. An initial list would have most of the 670+ BST Pokemon on there, as well as possibly some of the more troublesome Pokemon under that BST threshold, and then should any pokemon become problematic using dynamax as time goes on, we can simply do a suspect test from there. Some have argued against having suspect tests like this, saying they would be too problematic, controversial, and that there would simply be too many of them, but if such an initial list was to be made sufficiently big enough it shouldn't become too much of an issue. Almost everyone now agrees that the tier is in a bad place. so if such an option was to be chosen it should be done quickly and efficiently and then it can be fine-tuned over time. I guess you could call this a "complex ban" if you want to but that's also what OU has been based upon since the beginning of mons with their initial ubers banlist at the beginning of every gen, and there's not toooooooo much controversy there. With this option, you get the least amount of pokemon unnecessarily being banned to use dynamax and there's no weirdness with BSTs unnecessarily banning masses of pokemon or OU deciding uber policy.



The other option is just to ban dynamax, which I do have some growing fondness towards. The way I see it, fundamentally the best argument for keeping dynamax around is for the diversity it would add to the tier in making some of the less viable mons more viable. This wouldn't change how, in my opinion, the mechanic in itself is still fundamentally broken (hack took issue with me using this word, calling it a buzzword, but that's just semantics imo), however it is true that the diversity it would add to the tier, should it be balanced, is much appreciated even by many of those on the pro-ban side, despite the mechanic being an unbalanced one at it's core. Much of the arguments I've heard against keeping dynamax around are about how dirty it would be; for sure, there would be much debate about what to ban dynamax on, what not to keep it on, how the ban would be implemented in the first place, etc. These are all sound arguments, but the way I see it, at the end of the day should dynamax be balanced out properly it can be a net positive for the tier; it's a big risk though. In my opinion banning dynamax completely is the more conservative option for those who simply don't want to mess around, and it's of course the cleanest, easiest, and least controversial way of doing things. With that being said, I have heard many players, even those on the pro-ban side, being saddened about how the tier may become stale or too similar to gen 7 should the mechanic go away completely.



I would say I'm currently 50/50 on either of these options, and I can be convinced to go either way. I do think that having an initial dynamax banlist would be the best option to move forward with, should people want to keep the mechanic around. At this point it might just be the best thing to see what the playerbase decides to vote on, although I do know that some big names will be making posts here in the near future so maybe that will sway many people, we'll see.