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Introduction

Gallade and Alomomola enjoyed a glorious few days in the spotlight before falling to the ban hammer, leaving July’s meta for good. What is it that made these two pokemon in particular so overcentralizing, both in their original apperances and upon their return? The answers lie in the uncanny synergy between their moves and abilities.
 

Gallade
 

Gallade’s ability sharpness grants its moves a 1.5x power boost, so long as they’re slicing moves. Gallade’s surprisingly deep movepool effectively eliminates the caveat and makes the ability into an unrestricted Gorilla Tactics. When factoring in a STAB (Same Type Attack Bonus) boost, Gallade’s psycho cut and sacred sword dish out neutral damage more powerful than uboosted super effective attacks (12.5% more powerful for anyone wondering). If Gallade holds a choice band, the total power boost increases to a staggering 337 ½% when using STAB moves. Anything that doesn’t 4x resist Gallade’s stabs is going to suffer a minimum of 68% more damage than normal, and that’s not even accounting for potential supereffective coverage. (edited)

Almomola

Alomomola is a beast of a different nature. Its regenerator ability paired with flip turn, wish, and a monstrous 165 base HP stat renders chip damage essentially worthless against its teammates. Any of the 4 on their own aren’t anything worth writing home about, but all of them together synchronize better than Olympic swimmers. The most critical aspect to understand here is the mechanics behind Wish. The health it restores is an actual number, not a percent, and it depends on the user’s HP stat. For pokemon with lower base HP stats than the wish user, this means recovering more than 50%. Everything in the meta has significantly lower HP stat than Alomomola, which means pretty much any amount of damage can be healed off by switching in at the right time. Regenerator means that Alomomola still heals itself when using wish for others’ benefit, and flip turn provides a slow pivot to facilitate clean switch-ins for whatever wants to be healed.
 

Conclusion

Gallade and Alomola’s unique move/ability synchronizations meant the benefits from using any other similarly-functioning pokemon were far outweighed by the drawbacks of not having Mola or Gallade on your team. Given that, it’s little surprise that both were banned from the meta almost as quickly as they arrived. The advent of Pawmot and the second coming of Cloyster in intervening time though makes one wonder...was the cure worse than the disease?

Written by Typhon

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Hunter 3-1 Typhon