Former Pokemon world champion says Sword and Shield legendary Urshifu "completely breaks" the competitive scene due to one move

gamesradar.com:

A former Pokemon world champion has said one of Sword and Shield's legendries "completely breaks" the competitive scene with a single ability. 

Pokémon VGC World Championships 2016 winner and YouTuber, Wolfe Glick aka WolfeyVGC, has made a video taking aim at one specific Pokemon and what one of its abilities means for competitive play. In the video, titled 'Is this Pokemon Ruining the Game?', WolfeyVGC explains how Pokemon Sword and Shield legendary Urshifu changed the competitive Pokemon scene in "a way we literally could not see coming" back in 2019.

As explained in the video, WolfeyVGC believes that Pokemon "should not work" as a competitive game due to there being over a thousand different characters, an "incredibly complex" type chart, and new centralizing mechanics being added all the time. The Pokemon champion says that despite all of this, there's one simple move that allows the creature-collecting game to work as a competitive game.

The ability in question is Protect, which according to the YouTuber is "nearly worthless during a traditional playthrough" of a Pokemon game. The move allows players to not take any damage during their turn, protecting the Pokemon in your team so long as they don't overuse the ability. Almost every single Pokemon in the series can learn it and WolfeyVGC calls it "the bedrock of competitive Pokemon."

This is due to the ability allowing Pokemon games to center around "positioning and preservation" meaning (when playing in double battles - as most competitive games are) it's easier to keep one Pokemon alive while the other in your team deals damage: "It's the only reason this game works at all," the YouTuber claims. There are alternatives to Protect, like Faint and Imprison but none of these work as well as the aforementioned ability. 

As other competitive players will already know, it's the release of Pokemon Sword and Shield's expansion pass that threw a spanner in the works for Protect in competitive Pokemon. This is when