Defending the Indefensible: Master League Edition

"Actually, it's a good thing that there's a whole mode of play people can't compete in."

“My Vaporeon is powered up to Level 50.” Yeah, well, good luck against this Black Kyurem here, Devin.

In a comment on my last post, esteemed reader DiegoGoldeen2 had this to say in response to my clarion call to overhaul Pokémon GO’s Charged TM system:

I remember commenting (possibly when I was on Twitter) to someone who was defending (!) the charged TM system, that regardless of anything else, it’s just mind-numbingly boring sitting there cycling through endless moves you don’t want. Why would anyone want that?

Diego, I couldn’t pretend to tell you how or why someone would defend one of the most maligned mechanics in PoGO today. Then again, people defend open Master League, and I feel like justifying a pay-to-win structure that excludes or otherwise disincentivizes participation either requires a certain level of brain rot or betrays the notion that these gatekeeping types are trying to convince themselves that the proceedings are fair and aboveboard—not just you.

Before we begin dissecting the merits of its stalwart supporters’ talking points, I’ll acknowledge as I have in the past that I do like one aspect of Master League compared to Great League or Ultra League, at least in theory: assuming all Pokémon are fully powered up, they’re all the same power level (50). I get, by the way, that they could be Level 51 with the Best Buddy boost, but we’re talking degrees of separation here. It’s not like in Great League, where your Level 20 Feraligatr could be facing off against a Level 50 Diggersby. No sizable gaps of that sort.

As I’ve also previously touched upon, even with the level playing field, not all maxed-out Pokémon are created equal. Despite reaching a high Combat Power of over 5,000 at Level 50, if you’re bringing a Slaking into open Master League, you’re asking for trouble. Despite being both bulky and spammy, its best Fast Attack (read: only Fast Attack) is Yawn, a move that does zero damage. Barring a move update, the “Lazy Pokémon” is best left on the shelf, presumably to lounge about.

Yawn or no Yawn, the majority of the highest-ranked Pokémon on PvPoke’s Master League rankings are either Legendary or Mythical Pokémon. Of the top 50, only 12 entries are “regular” Pokémon, and two are merely Shadow versions of species already represented (Annihilape, Gyarados). This is where the issue of accessibility comes into play. In order to fully power up a Legendary Pokémon, you’re going to need to do enough Raids to get to 296 Candies XL for its standard version or 360 Candies XL for its Shadow iteration. At only a few Candies XL per Raid, that’s going to cost you—in a game billed as “free,” no less. The alternative is to use Rare Candies XL, which, as the name suggests, are rare, meaning powering up one Pokémon using this method likely means significantly depleting this resource, if not totally.

Even if time and money aren’t obstacles, you still need the bandwidth to complete the Raid and earn the candies. If there are few Gyms in your area or a low concentration of players, you could struggle without paying a premium for Remote Raid Passes. Unless, of course, you are “spoofing” to falsify your physical location or using multiple accounts, actions which are against Niantic’s Terms of Service and could get you banned—though that sure doesn’t stop people, and the degrees to which these violations are enforced varies.

So, yeah, active participation in open Master League (OML) tends to involve forking over real-world cash for the privilege or outright chicanery to circumvent the barriers to entry. A few weeks ago, when your options were either OML or Scroll Cup, an ill-conceived limited meta that made thematic sense but lacked a cohesive logic, I was a member of the audience for a GO Battle League stream in which one particular chatter was rifling off defense after defense of the former. I wasn’t taking notes, so I can’t remember if every last one of these ideas was covered, but between this chatter and the types of users that haunt the inhospitable landscape known as Pokémon GO Twitter, there’s enough to recount here.

Let’s review these bits of rhetoric and assess them on their potential validity (spoiler alert: I don’t think they are all that valid).

“You can win without using Legendary Pokémon.”

Technically, you can win in open Master League without using Legendary or Mythical Pokémon. Technically, Aubrey Plaza could knock on my door and ask me out to dinner. Both are possible, if improbable. In terms of Pokémon GO-specific scenarios, the crux of this debate is consistency. You can win in OML without paying to win, but it’s that much harder to win consistently and that much more limiting to your roster of available Pokémon.

Generally, when I watch people do Master League—which I try not to do because I don’t have the Pokémon for it, and it makes me salty for that fact alone—they’re using their Origin Palkias and their Black Kyurems and their Necrozmas and other things that, if you didn’t know better, you’d think were designer drugs. (Is Xerneas a Pokémon or a treatment for COPD? Don’t look it up if you don’t already know.) They’re not using the more readily available Pokémon, and they’re definitely not using Slaking. After all, when you have the means, why would you handicap yourself?

“These Pokémon have been out for a long time.”

Listen—you could bring back Tapu Lele 1,000 times at this point. For someone like me who doesn’t put money into the game and who usually only does Legendary Raids during events like Community Days and GO Fests/GO Tours, I’m basically never going to be able to complete these Raids at the scale needed to earn enough regular Candies, let alone Candies XL, to max one out. To this effect, I’d probably legitimately need 1,000 rotations to make it happen. This Raid Boss rotation, I’ve yet to do one five-star Raid, with my time out this past weekend devoted to Mega Audino, not Tapu Lele.

If you don’t have a dedicated Raid group or an especially active local Pokémon GO community on which to rely, how long ago a Pokémon was released is largely academic. Audemars Piguet has been making watches since 1875. Will you likely ever see me wearing one of their expensive-ass timepieces? Hell no.

“At least this way, you don’t have to build two versions of Pokémon: one for open ML and one for Master League Classic.”

True, but if I had to choose, I would’ve only built one—and it wouldn’t have been for OML. I’ve already written in depth about my disagreement with the decision to eliminate ML Classic, so I won’t expand too much more on the subject.

When Niantic announced that they were opting to end ML Classic, overnight, most of my Master League builds were relegated to Rocket Grunt duty. Based on their utility in this regard, I actually don’t regret the investments I made. Especially Heatran, the Shadow Scizor-melting wonder that it is. I’d still prefer to use them for more than literal grunt work, though.

“You 1500 CP babies always need something to complain about.”

This isn’t about Master League per se, but it’s coming from the Master League player I referenced earlier, so I’m including it in this space. His quote here came on the heels of a discussion in chat about Morpeko. More specifically, it was a discussion about how much those of us who engaged in the discussion detest Morpeko. Yeah, we’re complaining about it, but I mean, dude, you’ve seen it, right? Left unchecked, I’ve witnessed the Hell Hamster decimate teams—and it’s not like these teams were particularly weak to it, either. It was dominating in neutral matchups.

I can’t say whether Morpeko is the most broken Pokémon in GBL history. As strong as it is, without shields, it’s pretty squishy, and Mud Slap users are a clear hard counter to it. Besides, there have been long stretches where a selected few Pokémon have reigned supreme at the top of the meta. Still, to dismiss concerns about how balanced or unbalanced Morpeko is based on the notion that Great League players are serial complainers seems like a ridiculous deflection. My criticisms come as someone who is limited to Great League and Ultra League by matter of principle. I don’t endorse any of the open leagues—and I consciously reject Master League.

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It is the year 2079. I still don’t have a Tapu Lele fully powered up.

What got me thinking about open Master League again? In another well-liked comment on a Jonkus video from the handsome and talented author of this blog, I offered that I might have to bite the bullet and play Ultra League because, while I didn’t want to play open UL (OUL), I really didn’t want to play two weeks of Scroll Cup. Implicit here was that I sure as Shiinotic wasn’t going to play Master League during the second week that Scroll Cup was eligible. Optimally, I’d be playing OUL the first week and playing Scroll Cup the second week.

I received this comment in reply (edited for clarity):

The only league that should indefinitely stay all the time is Master League. Those are the people who spend cash on the game to max out their Pokémon, and they should take priority from a business standpoint. And yes, while people don’t love the money aspect and while this is a game for us, for others, it’s a business, and it’s all about making money and keeping the players that make them money happy.

You’ve probably already guessed it, but I don’t vibe with this line of thinking. What’s striking about this user’s reasoning is that, in one breath, they acknowledge that heavy monetization is a detriment to Pokémon GO and that the game should be designed and implemented with players in mind, but they espouse the belief that Niantic/Scopely should accelerate and encourage this monetization and that the biggest spenders should be rewarded for their habits in an ostensibly free game. In other words, it’s a bad setup, but it’s not going to change anytime soon, so we might as well just dig in and cater to the whales. This is like saying capitalism is a fundamentally flawed system, but we can capitalism our way out of it. Um, what? When I used the phrase “brain rot” earlier in this piece, I meant it.

There are going to be people who will defend the indefensible in any number of contexts and for matters of greater import, at that. In the wake of the Trump administration announcing “reciprocal tariffs” based on math that economists across the political spectrum find—and I’m being charitable here—a little questionable, I’ve heard commentators contort themselves to try to justify a move that punishes average consumers across the globe. Bro, let the president cook. I see one of two possibilities here. The first is that they are operating on blind faith and, seemingly like Donald Trump and his cronies, a fundamental miscomprehension of how tariffs work. The second is that they do get it, but they are lying hacks. Which is true? Which is worse? I’ll leave that for you to decide, Reader.

That same stream in which the Trainer who operates three separate Pokémon GO accounts and lives in New York City (!) penned his treatise in defense of Master League, the streamer doing the battling was more or less bullied into doing a set of OML by chat, who rejoiced at not having to watch any more Scroll Cup. Ultimately, she could’ve refused, and at the end of the day, it’s just video games, but weeks after the fact, I’m kind of kicking myself for not coming to her defense and for not challenging Mr. NYC on the merits of his talking points. Maybe this is an overdeveloped sense of justice at work, and maybe arguing in chat with another moderator would’ve only made the situation worse. Maybe the only true responsibility is on the team behind PoGO to make a better game. If not for pay-to-win modes of play and insipid alternatives, we wouldn’t need to worry so much about what is fair and which users should “take priority.”

Nevertheless, I feel like leaving bad takes uncontested in the name of civility does us a disservice. The Charged TM system in its current form is bad. A Master League dominated by Legendary and Mythical Pokémon and propped up by a flawed Candies XL economy is bad. Anyone who says different is either deluded or disingenuous, and they should be regarded as such.