I'm no TI or scpinion, but I want to throw my two cents on the matter. Let's talk first about the other three metagames you have mentioned.sorry if this comes across as rude, but how can you justify enforcing donor reveal in inheritance because it makes it too hard to work out what the set is, when so many other oms suffer the same flaw? bh is obv the main offender in this regard, but also sketchmons and aaa to a somewhat lesser extent. none of these have anything like donor reveal: why should inheritance be an exception?
Sketchmon. A creative metagame where your Pokémon can dedicate a moveslot to any move it desires: recovery, status, support, boosting, stronger attack, coverage, lure or something completely surprising. However, you and your opponent both have access to only six surprise factors in the team, while 3/4 of the movesets of your Pokémon is largely known territory. You may be facing a Roost Z-Flyinium Landorus-T, but once revealed that you can work around this threat relatively easily, since you know more or less what to expect from its other moves: Earthquake (almost guaranteed), U-turn, Knock Off, Stone Edge and similar known attacks. It's definitely easier to prepare from threats in this metagame, while still having enough freedom to pull random aces out of your pockets.
Almost Any Ability. Replace that yucky Ability with another one and change the moveset to better make use of the new Ability. This may be quite random, since there is an enormous amount of Abilities to choose from, but at the end of the day your Pokémon are still restricted to their available moves. Also, naturally defensive Pokémon tend to prefer defensive Abilities, like something that heals HP or that neutralize a weakness, while offensive Pokémon tend to run more offensive variants, like Abilities to deal more damage or to bypass your opponents' Abilities. Sure, you may deviate from that and have more unique Abilities, but at least you can better predict some of the potential sets.
Balanced Hackmon. This is essentially Run Anything You Want: The Metagame. It's a metagame where you can essentially run anything you wish without restrictions. However, to me this is a metagame that can't really be compared to other metagames, since its lore is an extremely difficult concept to master and learn. Like, having absolutely no idea of what your opponent can do to mess up with you is… well, a game of chances. This would be almost like playing chess with a blindfold, where you hope to pull off the correct move and to not be demolished by one of your opponent's strategies. However, only because one metagame is essentially built on this random premise, it doesn't mean that all metagames should be allowed to have this same random premise.
The issue with Inheritance is that there is way too much guesswork, even with the restriction of having only legal sets. Basically, you would be completely in the dark against all six of your opponent's Pokémon, turning every match in a dice roll where you hope to not be messed up by some random set from a random Pokémon and hope that your random strategy will be as effective in practice as it is on paper. This is not very friendly toward newer players, who will essentially need to keep track of every change and popular set by playing an infinite amount of games, and essentially turns it into "BH with legal sets".
This is a quite taxing chore for many new people, and it's why I appreciated the donor reveal. With that, I had a better idea of what I was facing, and I could work around that threat better by choosing the best Pokémon to check the potential set of the opposing Pokémon. Without that info, I would have scrambled to find something to stop that threat and thrown a few Pokémon in an attempt to scout the opposition. However, would have that be enough? Of course not, I would have needed to do the same with the other five teammates, meaning that keeping my team healthy enough to reveal all the opponent's cards is imperative. Oh, and this all happens while trying to keep my own cards hidden, too.
You all keep comparing Inheritance to those "creative" metagames, but it isn't the only metagame with an indicator. The popular Mix and Mega metagame has an indicator too, which helps a lot during a match, since you have a clearer idea of what you are dealing with. If it wasn't visible, I bet it would be a huge mess for the same "rabbit in the hat principle" and surely not be as popular as it is.
You must not preserve a metagame in a way only because a minority of capable players have learned the ropes. You should instead be trying to have a metagame so that anyone can get into it and play it relatively easily, whether it is a new player or a veteran. And, honestly speaking, Inheritance throws off quite a few new people.
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