magnet pull

the problem with magnet pull and trapping abilities in general is that they remove one of if not the most basic element of competitive singles play, that being switching. When magnezone comes in whether by a free switchin or a double or even harding in on the things its meant to prey on, steel types such as scizor, ferrothorn, celesteela, kartana it not only seizes momentum but guarantees that those pokemon are either removed or severely chipped when you would otherwise switch out with them if you were facing a heatran for example. The fact that it is able to guarantee damage, if not outright removal,vs the most of best defensive typing in the metagame is huge as steel types are extremely common and a backbone for many bulky offense, balance and stall teams. Magnezones very presence forces you to play drasticly differently to avoid losing your celesteela or ferrothorn by constantly switching out and predicting your opponent in every scenario when they only need to make the play once and they have your steel. This skews the level of skill needed drastically in favor of the zone user seeing as they must make one correct prediction and one correct prediction only in order to accomplish their goal of removing the steel. The celesteela/scizor/ferrothorn user on the other hand must constantly double out in order to preserve their mon and must be wary of switching them hard into pokemon they are supposed to beat in fear of a magnezone double, when if it was any other mon they would still be able to switch out and recover from the advantageous position their opponent placed themselves in. Next it is important to address how scarf zone impacts one of the best breakers in the tier, kartana, by guaranteeing that it will remove one mon max. Very often you do not need all 6 of ur mons to win a game, and thus there are your expendable mons that you can than sacrifice to sd or band kartana in order to bring in magnezone and revenge kill the threat. With kartana out of the way you struggle to break their balance core when otherwise kartana would be able to collect its kill and simply switch out. However, the kart is unable to fulfill its purpose on the team due to magnet pull, demonstrating how unhealthy this ability is that it invalidates one of the tiers top breakers. While heatran, the most prominent steel in the tier, does not fall prey to magnezone 1v1, it can be chipped by scarf volt switches or plucked off if low enough by a scarf tbolt so it is not entirely safe from magnezones trapping capability. This is also true for assault vest magearna who is forced to take damage in scenarios where you would otherwise want it to remain healthy and have something else absorb magnezones blows but cannot switch and are forced to have ur switchin to lele weakened for example just as tran is forced to be weakened for the likes of mawile or scizor. Mega Mawile, similar to kartana, can be removed by substitute z move sets after it sets up a SD or by scarf sets with a bit of prior damage thanks to its low special bulk. While spdef jirachi is capable of stalling out tbolts from scarf zone and even u turning out, that fails to account for magnezones ability to run substitute and z move, in which case the magnezone gets a free sub and is able to nuke the incoming answer with a stab z move coming off its impressive base 130 special attack. One defense of magnet pull I often see is that if they don't have the particular mon that zone aims to trap that it is "dead weight" in the battle but this is not entirely true nor relevant. For starters, magnezones typing offers it a plethora of resistances to fairy, flying, ice, electric, psychic, etc meaning you can throw it in vs the likes of kokos tbolt, clefables moonblast, leles psyshock, tornadus therians hurricane and other attacks that it resists. The next and more important point I feel is that if magnezone isn't able to trap anything that means they don't have one of the mons that stops the threat you paired with magnezone, such as pinsir, that wants its checks removed because there is nothing to remove. Obviously pinsir has other ways of being dealt with thatn celesteela or skarmory, but the fact of the matter is that pinsir would rather face a team without such mons than face a team with them considering that they are some of the best stops to it. In a metagame teeming with obscenely powerful threats including but not limited to zygarde, heatran and kartana and more lowkey bullshit mons such as volcarona, pinsir, lele every slot on your team is intstrumental in guarding vs as much as you possibly can, and removing an key component of the team is blatantly uncompetitive and should be suspected at the very least if not banned.