by Doc – Owner, Founder, Was Really Hoping to Be Right About Metagross For More Than 24 Hours
The new Legends Z-A trailer just released, and boy, I’m hoping that you sure like chaos in a metagame because you’re going to get a lot of it! There’s going to be a ton of new Pokémon coming, which we figured anyway, but what we didn’t figure on was that it’s releasing in about a month. Here’s what that means:
1. The pre-DLC meta will not settle in time
I was hoping we’d have to wait until February for the DLC to come out so that we could get an idea of what the early meta looks like. It seems this won’t be the case, because those extra two months just dissipated. Now we are basically going to be in a holding pattern competitively until the DLC releases. I’m kind of disappointed, to be honest – this early meta deserved to be fleshed out before it got exploded to kingdom come.
2. The post-DLC meta will be a completely different meta
We saw in the trailer that new Mega Evolutions are coming out. Actually, some new Mega Evolutions just came out! Mega Delphox we knew about, and Mega Chesnaught was not hard to guess, but Diancie? I don’t keep up with the leaks so that one took me by surprise. I don’t think Diancie will have a large impact on the meta because she’ll be double weak to Steel, and Metagross will chop her up easily, but now we’ll never know.
Still, the new options that look like they’ll be introduced in the DLC seem like they’ll completely rewrite how the meta could have shaped up. Even without Mega Evolutions, the addition of Hoopa and Annihilape who are very powerful Dark and Ghost type attackers in their native games would likely render Metagross obsolete. Suppose we banned Hoopa – okay, Annihilape is still legal and brutal as ever. He’s going to render anything weak to either Ghost or Fighting less viable, provided he can survive at least two hits to charge Rage Fist… and he’ll probably have Drain Punch to help with that.
There’s other options to consider, too – Baxcalibur being added gives us a solid Garchomp counter who happens to have Earthquake, allowing him to threaten both Garchomp and Metagross. And Garganacl being added, and presumably Salt Cure too, allows an Infestation stall team like what I described the other day to work on Metagross and other Steel types. So… I think Metagross is cooked. Actually it may be that most Steel types are going to have serious competition. Maybe it’s Excadrill’s time to shine again?
Oh, and now that Corviknight is in the game, there’s going to be serious competition between it and Skarmory to fill whichever roles they were going to fill. I’ll admit it’s not quite clear what role Skarmory was going to fill anyway, but now it’s going to be even less clear! My guess is most people will run Corviknight but there’s going to be differences between the two that are useful as the niche parts of the meta fill out in a few months time. It’ll really come down to the relative prominence of Fire and Electric types.
3. There’s probably enough legendaries to consider an “Anything Goes” tier
I’m going out on a limb here, but if we already have Xerneas, Yveltal, Zygarde and now Hoopa and Diancie… That’s significantly more than what we had in the base game. And I’d be surprised if we only had these five legendaries by story’s end. I’m not keeping up with the leaks on purpose – gotta preserve the hype – but given that Pokémon Scarlet had so many extra legendaries that were only available through Pokémon Home transfers or through the Indigo Disk DLC, I bet you dollars to donuts there’s going to be plenty of them here. Why not, to keep things interesting, let the 1v1 community grow for a bit and then eventually split it off into an Anything Goes tier with Megas and legendaries, and a more regulated tier with neither of them?
I think that’s a good idea for two reasons:
1) Having two different metas allows people bored with one to go experiment in the other. That way there’s always something people can try, and it helps keep things fresh so that the Legends Z-A meta will retain a community for longer. We want a long-term meta to emerge much like the mainline games that are still getting played competitively 20 years later, so taking a page out of their book and having their ranking system is probably the best way to do it. And if we’re lucky, it may even be recognized as a legitimate meta in the broader community because of the level of organization put into it.
2) There hasn’t been an interesting Anything Goes meta in at least 10 years, which was dominated entirely by Mega Rayquaza. If we sort of self-appointed ourselves as the newest Anything Goes meta, that fact and the fighting game nature of Z-A establishes a niche for Pokémon Legends Z-A, marketing it as an interesting anomaly. There’s a lot of interest in metagame anomalies in the Pokémon content community in general, so we’ll be an evergreen topic for Pokémon YouTuber channels. It’s a way to keep this meta alive even when Generation 10 releases.
4. The overall lifespan of Legends Z-A will likely be shorter than Scarlet and Violet
I’ve heard that Generation 10 is going to come in 2026 according to some leaks. I don’t know if that’s the case, but I do think it’s quite telling that less than 2 months after release Legends Z-A is getting DLC. Now, this may not be the only DLC that it gets, but even so it’s certainly a fast timeline for a company that has been lambasted for the last few years on putting out games too quickly. Suppose we were to have a second wave of DLC – when would it release? If the next Pokémon game comes in 2026 then there’s not much time to get a second wave of DLC. From this I conclude that Mega Dimensions will probably be our only DLC, or at least a second piece of DLC will not come out past the first half of 2026, so the Legends Z-A timeline will be pretty short.
Let me know your thoughts.
Amiibo Doctor 