>>56409960I never bought any game after XY and never played any competitive metas for any of the generations afterward for more than a week.
I got interested in Gen 9 VGC at the tailend of Regulation H because of the poketubers and Smogon shitting the bed. Decided to really devote time to understanding the format when Regulation G became playable.
What the experience taught me is that the game has become complex to a super high degree. While I had fun for the most part, I was nowhere near breaking into the higher tier of play, which would require even more study and playtime than I was willing to devote. I was content to just main some Miraidon cores and mess around with lower tier legendaries here and there, because Miraidon play was just that fun and the concept of single restricted created an interesting dynamic that is replicated almost nowhere else.
While initially I was quite excited for Regulation H, as the concept of 0 legendaries is something I've always wanted, it became quickly apparent that because of the insane powercreep which has created many mons which are only technically not legendaries, that this format requires even *more* knowledge than Regulation G did.
The way the single restricteds centralized the meta allowed for a reasonable degree of variation and experimentation to keep things fresh but not super left field, and because you have your own "I win" button in your single-restricted, you could safely ignore a lot of gimmicks by sheer brute force.
But here, you have significantly fewer constraints for what mons are viable, while at the same time having demi-broken strats like Mouse-Ape that do in fact require a severe amount of fine-combed optimizations to your teams to not fall victim to. You'd need to scour the depths of the dex to find answers, a process only facilitated if you've been playing this era of Pokemon for years.
It's too much work for not enough reward when I don't like nu-Pokemon much to begin with.
