A case against Registeel

Hey battlers!

As we go through with the go battle league’s pre season, the battles are getting more intense and the ladder is becoming tougher to climb. While it’s all fun and games, there is something that is just trying to blow over the parade. Presenting to you the villain of go battle league: Registeel. 
Tracing back to main series games, Registeel was potentially the worst legendary ever. It was insanely tough to obtain in Pokémon RSE with the shenanigans involving braille and all that, and then was just a pile of steel crap which could not do anything in the game, except for taking up a space in your PC slot. 

Coming to Pokémon go, before 2nd November 2019, registeel was another one of those Pokémon who “have the stats but don’t have the moves” or “Dex entry legendary” or “why do I have this ugly thing”  However once niantic decided to give it access to ‘lock on’, hell broke lose for registeel. It went from being insanely pathetic to everyone’s favourite. 

But what the hell did lock on do for it that made this once radioactive waste a God in the great league?Well for one, registeel already was super bulky. 196 defence and 125 HP makes it the tankiest Mon in the great league. Adding to it, it has heavy hitting charge moves in Flash Cannon and Focus Blast, which make up for it’s low attack stat in 95. The main drawback to it was that it’s previous best fast move metal claw had really bad energy generation capacity and thus it couldn’t reach its moves. Enter Lock on. Lock on has the highest energy generation capacity of all moves, with it generating 5 energy per turn. For those of you who don’t know, a turn is 0.5 seconds. 

Let’s do a bit of math. Each flash cannon takes 65 energy. That’s 13 lock ons. Thus Registeel can fire a flash cannon every 6.5 seconds. That is 110 base power move, without even considering STAB every 6.5 seconds. To put this into perspective, Umbreon gets to a foul play in 6 seconds. Swampert reaches a hydro cannon in 5 seconds. So you can just see, that how a pile of slowly decaying debris just became a spammy monster with the introduction of Lock On into its life. 

But hey, this all seems like pretty good and looks like I’m making a case for registeel. However, things kinda get ugly. 

Registeel is like a plague in the current go battle league meta. It’s literally everywhere. Everyone is bringing one and the game is just becoming stale and boring really quick. I mean it’s not even been a week. Imagine waiting for something for like 3 months and then getting bored out of it in a week because nobody refuses to let go of a weird metal doll. 

Okay I get it. Registeel making the game boring isn’t a good enough reason to not use it. But think about it. Everytime you build your team, you just be like alright, but what would I do against Registeel. Or it’s all cool but what about Registeel. Or What would registeel do. I mean give me a freaking break. Registeel is so centralising in the meta game that we need to get rid of it. 

One of the major complaints about PvP when it initially came was that not a lot of people are encouraged to do PvP. Niantic tried to solve this problem by bringing to us the Go battle league. Go battle league is supposed to cater to a group of people who are not only way too serious about PvP, but also to newcomers and casuals. Registeel being a legendary Pokémon, costs 100 candies and 100k stardust. It’s a really expensive Pokémon and a lot of these players would not go for one as again, it’s just too expensive and they cannot afford one, which just puts them at an inherent disadvantage. 

I know Registeel isn’t invincible. It does have “counters” to it but it’s not an easy job to counter it. Firstly, if it has a slight energy advantage it would just rupture you because it’s so freaking spammy. Nothing truly “walls” it, except Alolan Marowak, which comes with a ton of drawbacks of its own. Between focus blast and flash cannon, it can hit almost any Pokémon for atleast neutral damage, barring some exceptions. And the fact that registeel just outright shuts off a lot of Pokémon (Altaria, Skarmory, Venusaur, Umbreon to name a few) that are quite popular in the metagame, makes it even tougher to face one. 

Thus I suggest to you or rather request, to try to not bring Registeel in your Go battle league teams as it’s just unhealthy for the meta to develop and not friendly to newer people.