PM to legends about Camo

Hey BKC!

I would like to know your thoughts on some tiering decisions linked to a metagame that you're not playing but still, due to your experience and your knowledge as one of the veteran on Smogon and especially in ADV OU, I think it will be useful for us.

First do not hesitate to tell me if you're not interested in answering for absolutely any reason, I will perfectly understand! Just let me know! Also do not hesitate to blame SFG because that's him who gave me your Discord haha.

I will try to make this as short as possible (edit: I failed) while giving you all the information you have to know to get an idea.

So here we go! My question is about Camomons, an Other Meta which was in OMPL or WCoOMs the last 2 years and of which I was a player. The particular mecanic of Camomons is to change your typing according to your 2 first moveslots. For example, a Porygon-Z with Ice Beam and Thunderbolt on first 2 moveslots will be Ice/Elec. This mecanic allows mon to get better offensive and defensive typing and is therefore intrisically balanced.

But there's actually a problem which is pointed out by the council and me, Calm Minders. Actually, due to the fact that mon can change their typing in Camomons, it becomes easy to get more efficient typing for setup with Toxic immunity or few weaknesses. To give you a better idea of the problem, let me take Clefable, the pink demon of ORAS OU, as an example to show my point.

Clefable has in Camomons many possibilities. Fairy/Elec gives you an additionnal weakness to Ground but the additional resists and immunity to para is really helpful. But still, Clefable isn't able to deal with Steel/Ground like Heatran (Taunt) or Melmetal or Ground/Fire Volcanion. But what's about Fairy/Fire Clefable? Well, Tran and Volca are still answer but Melmetal isn't able to check it now. But Clefable is also played with the Fairy/Ghost typing. Now, Clefable can pressure every Steel mons with Sball and is immune to trap that partially remove this kind of counterplay. But finally, what's about Fairy/Water Clef? While Water Pulse is a bad move (in general we search to optimize usefulness of the moves while trying to get a good typing), Fairy/Water is great and actually completely change the way to check it. All this versions are viable meaning that, in practise, it's particularly hard to prep against Clef and it often introduces a excessive importance of the MU.

But what are you going to tell me? Ban Clefable if it's a problem no? And indeed, that's a way to solve the problem. And that's what we did with the Camomons council during this time. We banned Latias, Latios, Reuniclus, Slowking-G due to CM and partially Spectrier and Mew due to CM. But the problem is still there with many other borderline (can appear broken or too unhealthy in the future) CM users like Clefable, Magearna or Necrozma for example. There're also Cresselia, Sigilyph, Slowbro-Galar, etc. An important point is that all make them broken or unhealthy is CM. Clefable without CM keep the utility of the defensive sets like Knock, Wish, Trick, SR, etc but isn't able to press a magic button to win the game depending on the MU.

We think that we reached a point where we cannot continue to ban mon after mon and just see new Calm Minders apear because they were just overshadowed by the others. Then, the council and me seriously put on the table the idea to get rid of CM or introduce a complex ban that prevents CM + recovery. But OM leaderships have forbidden us to take this path due to the fact that banning CM is somehow against Smogon tiering policy.

Regarding the recent decisions made in ADV OU such as the complex ban linked to Baton Pass, walls are not fixed anymore and in some specific cases, we can eventually do complex or unclassical ban (ban a move for instance) if that's the best way to lead the metagame.
And that's where I want to know your thoughts. Do you also think that this path is forbidden even if it's actually probably the best way to lead the meta in our opinion? Is banning CM from Camo is like openning a Pandora's box that would allow to do anything?

Indeed some others counter-arguments advanced by OM leaders are the fact that, banning CM will then open the path to ban other moves like Nasty Plot for instance. Indeed, Hydreigon, Tornadus-Therian and Naganadel are banned due to NP (mainly) so, is NP the problem or is the mons themselves? The fact is, having banned these mons ended up the "issue of NP". There's no more annoying NP mon in the metagame, the problem was resolved. The difference with CM is, Calm Minders are still a problem while we already ban a bunch of them.

People also argue that Calm Minders isn't the root of the problem but that's bulky setup in Camomons which is a problem (and there's nothing to do with that). We disagree with that because, for instance, Bulk Up, the physical equivalent to CM, has only like 3 viable users (Buzzwole, Zarude and Urshifu, whose are perfectly fine btw) while viable Calm Minders are like about twenty? That's essentially due to the fact that there's definitely more CM mons than BU mons in game. And especially CM+recovery in much more common than BU+revovery. There's also a big difference between BU, Curse or SD (physical setup) and CM, NP (special setup) which is burn. There's many viable Scald users and Flame Body Coalossal and Heatran are among the best mon in the meta meaning that we can generate more counterplay to physical bulky setup unlike special setup.