It's no secret that while competitive Pokemon battling is more or less a sport that gives you tons of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:options for team building, there are certain parts of the game that are unavailable to players. Whether it's official VGC tournaments or community-led institutions such as Smogon, someone in charge has to ban certain Pokemon, abilities, or, in this case, moves.
Reasons for banning certain moves vary. Some moves are generally not good for the sport. Some happen to be overpowered in specific metas and need to be banned to keep things balanced. Some don't work the way they're supposed to and are banned to avoid any confusion or exploitation. These eleven (or nineteen, really) moves fall under either one of those three categories, and have been banned from certain competitive formats at some point in time.
11 Curse, Forest's Curse, Power Trick, & String Shot
For a brief period of time in VGC 18, a seemingly random pool of status moves was banned from competitions due to a glitch that occurred while using them. When participating in Live Competition battles in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ultra Sun and Moon, Curse, Forest's Curse, Power Trick, and String Shot all caused the game to freeze when the move was used.
Since big tournaments such as VGC used the Live Competition mode of the game as their medium, those four moves needed to be banned. It's a bizarre case that didn't last that long; an update of the games aimed to fix the glitch, among other things.
10 Sky Drop
Undoubtedly the most well-known glitch to affect the competitive scene, a glitch involving the move Sky Drop caused it to be banned in nearly all of VGC's formats throughout Generation Five. The glitch occurs in Black, White, Black 2, and White 2 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Double and Triple battles, when a Poဣkemon uses Sky Drop, then another uses Gravity.
The latter cancels the former, but whi꧒le the user of Sky Drop can continue the battle as usual, the target of Sky Drop cannot move while remaining vulnerable to damage, status effects, and the like, until the user leaves the field via knockout or switch. Naturally, Sky Drop was banned to prevent exploitation of the glitch, until it was fixed in the subsequent generation.
9 Drag🎶on Rage & Sonic Boom 🍬
There exists a Smogon competitive tier called the Little Cup, or LC. It's basically the weakest possible tier out there, consisting of first-stage Pokemon. A specific quirk of the tier is that all Pokemon must be at Level 5, so Pokemon's stats will be calculated as such.
That makes moves like Dragon Rage and Sonic Boom that deal a relatively high fixed amount of HP (40 and 20, respectively) pretty ov♛erpowered, since Level 5 Pokemon barely have any HP. As such, those two moves have been banned in previous generations of LC, until Generation Eight when they were removed from the game entirely.
8 ꦐ Sticky Web ♍
Probably the least popular but most underrated entry hazard, Sticky Web drops the opponent's Speed a stage upon entry. While it's not a commonly seen niche in higher tiers of competitive play, it had dominated the Little Cup for a while, so much so that most saw it as banworthy.
A perfect storm of the best checks to Sticky Web strategieℱs (i.e. Defog users) recently getting banned and the remaining Pokemon in the tier being ill-equipped to slow them down caused Sticky Web to be banned in Generation Eight LC.
7 Chatter
Another bizarre move ban, but this one doesn't involve a glitch of any kind. A specific, non-battling related feature of this signature move caused it and its owner, Chatot, to get banned by the Global Battle Union.
During Generations Four and Five, Chatter, a (then) 60 base power move that caused confusion, also recorded the player's voice through the DS microphones. That unfortunately led to players recording vulgar language and using it in online battles. Due to Pokemon's strict censorship guidelines, the GBU's hand was forced, and the move's distinct feature was later removed in subsequent generations.
6 Aurora Veil 🐻 𝓀
Even without the convenience of using 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:premier hail-setter Alolan Ninetales, lower Smogon tiers in Generation Seven had to ban Aurora Veil. It was easy enough to get the hail set up beforehand, and once the Aurora Veil was🅺 up, i✅t proved difficult to beat.
The significantly raised defenses gave Pokemon so much freedom to 🌺set up and potentially sweep teams that tried desperately to get their licks in. There were barely any checksꦕ for it, and thus it was so powerful that it had to be banned.
5 Swagger
For a few generations, lower Smogon tiers had a "Swagger Clause", wherein you couldn't use Swagger in battle. That's because there was a certain luck-based strategy that plagued those tiers for a while.
That strategy was called SwagPlay, referring to Swagger and Foul Play. Swagger raised the target's Attack stat to go along with confusion, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:and Foul Play, which calculates damage from the target's Attack stat, took advantage of that. You could add to that with Thunder Wave paralysis and the Prankster ability and such, but otherwise, that strategy tore up lower tiers until Swagger was banned for a few generations.
4 Dark Void
The World Championships scene had some dark days—no pun intended—when this move was legal. While Dark Void's owner, Darkrai, was banned, Generation Six gave Smeargle access to the move via Sketch, and it absolutely broke the VGC meta, giving it an 80 percent chance to put two opponents to sleep at once. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:It has since been nerfed, dropping its accuracy to 50 percent and not allowing any Pokemon other than Darkrai to uඣꦍse it.
All that said, the move was never technically banned at that point, but it was officially banned in the prior Generation Five. It's a bit confusing why that ban didn't stay for longer, but at least VGC players don't have to worry about it now.
3 🧜 Baton Pass
Probably the most controversial move ban in all of competitive Pokemon, Baton Pass was only recently banned, around a generation ago. Teams revolving around Baton Pass were sticks in competitive players' craws for a while, and while efforts had been made to slow them down, it took a complete ban of the move to keep things in check.
Simply put, the ability to get stat boosts and pass them onto Pokemon that could really use them was just too overpowered. It was pretty easy to pull off, too; Ninjask was a common culprit thanks to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:its Speed Boost ability and access to Swords Dance.
2 ꦬ Double Team & Minimize
Arguably the mos😼t frustrating thing to run into in playthroughs is an opponent using evasion moves. Get your opponent to use it twice or so, and you're at the mercy of RNG potentially causing you to miss consecutively.
As such, it's completely banned across basically every competitive format, since it throws the strategic aspect of competitive battling out the window and leaves it all to chance, like with OHKO moves. While accuracy-dropping moves like Sand Attack and Muddy Water can be worked around, spamming an evasion move could make a Pokemon literally unstoppable. Double Team and Minimize have long been banned to unanimous agreement.