What was the best Generation OU for stalling?

Question

I need to make more people rage-quit on Showdown.

Comments

Probably BW, not 100% sure.

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I'm pretty sure the Gen 5 metagame was focused around stalling

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I'd say either gen 1 or gen 2. You can have max EVs in every stat, wallbreaking stuff like choice items and nasty plot didn't exist, some walls were not weak to any high-power moves, and sleep was more broken. You can see the "stalliness" statistic for each generation here: https://www.smogon.com/stats/2023-07/metagame/

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Gen 5 is a pretty bad generation for stall as far as I know, lots of powerful breakers running around.
Good generations for stall include: Gen 2, Gen 3, Gen 4
Decent/Mediocre stall gens include: Gen 6, Gen 7, Gen 5, Gen 8
This list is only counting hardcore stall as actual stall and not including semi-stall and bulky balance stuff.
It's hard to decide definitively which is the best for stall, but I'd probably say DPP or GSC.

Answer 1

As of right now, it's probably gen seven where you can create a reliable stall team with Mega Sableye, Skarmory, and Chansey, core. Contrary to what most people think, gen two is not stall. Apparently, that's a misconception because while it was stally at one point, it no longer is. Offense is now common in the tier. Gen five and gen nine are probably the worst tiers for stall due to the crazy amount of offense. Gen eight it struggles a bit and I rarely saw it in the ladder when it was the current gen. Not to mention stall can get in a lot of trouble against the standard magma trapper Heatran and even trapper Fini

I found a couple posts on reddit which the main thread is about this question. The most common denominators are the start of gen six when Mega Sableye was released and start of gen seven when Dugtrio trapped and destroyed all stall counters

Comments

Thanks! It’s kind of strange to think a Gen as old as 2 can swap how it works.

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Stall is still solid in gen 2, it's just not as dominant as it used to be be. I agree that 7 is a pretty decent stall gen, but hardcore stall in gen 7 is a bit unreliable in my experience. Why do you say it's THE best stall gen? I feel like DPP stalls are more consistent.

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Just because offense is common doesn't mean it's more viable than it is in other generations. Also if your answer contradicts https://www.smogon.com/stats/2023-07/metagame/ , does that mean those statistics are inaccurate?

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@archor9 that's because the older metagame still keep getting played in tournaments. That's why new sht gets discovered every now and then. You can watch BKC on youtube to see how new mons rose to prominence after the generation is no longer the current one

@cdijk16 I only based that from the reddit posts. I really only play gen seven ou and gen nine ubers so I don't know much about the old gens. Though, trying to break a hardcore stall team that's designed to waste someone's time can be very annoying since it's just about impossible to set down hazards against Sableye

@sumwun actually, those statistics support the answer. If I understood it correctly, the txt files ranks the playstyle of teams from most common. If tlhat is correct, it supports the answer for the highest ladder files of gen six and seven have the highest perceptage of stall which is 14%

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If you look closer to the bottom of the files, you can see that gen 1 and gen 2 are the only 2 generations that have a mean "stalliness" higher than 0.7. If the statistics contradict themselves, then I guess it's probably caused by the statistics calculations using different definitions for similar terms.

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@mangy vagrant I feel like reddit posts are not very reliable sources(for old gens) as they tend to overlook old gens like DPP (whose stall teams are much more solid than gen 7 stall). This is because people on r/stunfisk and the like mostly play recent gens(6+). Gen 7 stall is a bit mu fishy because it's almost impossible to defensively handle the entire gen 7 OU tier.