Aurora Veil being controversial in the SM NU metagame is nothing new. In fact, people have thought of it as potentially banworthy since day one. While it is true that Aurora Veil has seen somewhat less use than before throughout the most recent edition of NUPL, it still poses the same threat to teams in the tier that it did in the past. Despite thinking there was a clear problem with Aurora Veil for a while, I am glad that this has waited for a bit because the young metagame has evolved quite a bit over time and tackling what is essentially an entire playstyle that was not too common simply did not seem pressing with broken Pokemon such as Cofagrigus and Meloetta still residing in the tier. Additionally, given that Aurora Veil is a move that shapes an entire playstyle (see: 1 and 2 ), metagame shifts can easily make some element of the archetype become much better or worse in little-to-no time, meaning that jumping the gun and prematurely banning Aurora Veil could occur and I, personally, did not want to rush this decision. However, Meloetta is now banned, the metagame is reaching what I consider to be a consistent state (not ready to label it as balanced quite yet, but we're getting there), and Aurora Veil's not getting any worse. Therefore, I believe that it is now the appropriate time for a thread like this to be posted and for Aurora Veil to befrom the SM NU metagame.some may ask. The answer to that question boils down to the fundamental means of counterplay for win conditions in any competitive metagame, in my opinion. If you face any set-up sweeper or win condition in general, there are generally two ways to respond to it. These two ways are by using a defensive check/counter that can defeat the win condition or by revenge killing the win condition.Now that we have this fundamental down pat, let's look at how Aurora Veil works and the impact Aurora Veil has on gameplay. Aurora Veil significantly reduces the damage that Pokemon take, but can only be set up when Hail is present. In the SM NU metagame, Aurorus is a passable lead that has Snow Warning, Stealth Rock, Encore, and the ability to threaten most Pokemon with Blizzard and Freeze Dry. Generally speaking, Aurorus functions as a suicide lead on Aurora Veil teams and once it dies, you send out an Aurora Veil setter with Light Clay -- the two main setters are Sandslash-Alola and Cryogonal. Sandslash-Alola has Slush Rush, so it can outrun pretty much everything to make setting up Aurora Veil pretty much foolproof. Cryogonal has a great speed tier and it can also set up Reflect and Light Screen alongside Aurora Veil, making any attempt to actually damage Pokemon via attacking become relatively futile.Once Aurora Veil (and potentially Reflect and/or Light Screen) is set up and the early game is out of the way, Aurora Veil teams tend to have their remaining four Pokemon dedicated to sweeping through opposing teams. Essentially, these teams have four normally potent win conditions stacked together to abuse Aurora Veil and break open teams together. Here is where we go back to the aforementioned fundamental means of counterplay from the paragraph above -- in order to defeat a win condition, you have to actually kill it and doing so is either done via defensively checking/countering it to the extent that you can kill the win condition before it can kill you or revenge killing the win condition. The presence of Aurora Veil in SM NU makes eliminating win conditions via either of these methods incredibly challenging and, for some teams, borderline impossible.Think of it this way -- if you have a win condition like Barbaracle, which is already seen as one of the tier's better win conditions, then you are going to want to chip away at the opponent's team until it can sweep and then find an opening to set-up in order to enact this sweep. If Aurora Veil is present, then finding the opportunity to set-up safely becomes much easier. If you pair Barbaracle with numerous other win conditions that force opponents to react in the same fashion, that forces them to be on the defensive, then you are going to get an opening for Barbaracle quite easily. This same line-of-logic can, more or less, be applied to any of the other common win conditions found on Aurora Veil (if you're using the standard team, then these would be Turtonator, Vivillion, and Virizion, but other Pokemon such as Scrafty can also perform quite well under these circumstances, too). This whole hypothetical above, which is actually a very realistic scenario that Aurora Veil essentially presents itself with most games, demonstrates the fact that Aurora Veil prevents a healthy, fundamental facet of the game when it comes to having counterplay to opposing win conditions. I can go through countless games with examples and I can explain how preparing teams for Aurora Veil teams makes you either go far out of your way to the point where you have compromised quite a bit or used something very specific (partially due to the tier's poor pool of viable Defog users), but I think that the counterplay point in itself should really be what we put the most emphasis on when making most arguments here seeing as it connects to everything else that I have referenced to and it ruins competitive gameplay in the metagame itself.Given how Aurora Veil teams have performed in the SM NU metagame, I believe that there clearly is a problem and we must address it. As for what should be done, I believe that this is pretty straightforward. There are multiple users of Aurora Veil, in Sandslash-Alola and Cryogonal, and both prove to have similar effectiveness. Additionally, there are multiple other viable Pokemon that learn Aurora Veil and could potentially replace Sandslash-Alola or Cryogonal (not going to say they would do as well or lead to there being a banworthy problem as that is theorymon and I do not welcome any theorymon in discussions like this). Therefore, banning either or both of these Pokemon should be off the table, in my opinion. The problem also is not any singular win condition or threat under Aurora Veil, but rather the collective nature of the archetype. As an extension of this, Aurora Veil is the only reason why this archetype exists in the first place and should be the subject of any potential vote or ban. Furthermore,