History YMMV / PokemonShuffle

** More or less enforced on the player by the game mechanics and natural progression of the stages. A vast majority of Pokémon have less than 60 Power. Not counting any pokemon from the special or expert stages or who can mega evolve, you will find yourself using Aurorus, Zoroark, Ninetails, Nidoking, Scyther, Conkeldurr, Sawk, Meinshao, Bronzong, and Tropius fairly often. Most of these have a lot of type advantages over others, and the game's progression has you fighting certain types far more often than others. Even if you capture all the special Pokemon as they appear, a good number of them are likely to be stronger already by that point in the game.

** Mega Gengar as well. While it copies the primary mechanic that the standard Gengar stage before it used (keeping the middle two columns frozen nearly at all times), in this stage there is also a 5th ineffective support added in the form of Eevee, and Mega Sableye is the only Mega Pokemon at this point who's super-effective against Gengar. His mega ability is unable to touch the middle 8 barriers of the board.

** The EX stages in general. For the first few, up to Yveltal, you only need like 5 S ranks to unlock the next one. However, starting at Mewtwo, you need a fluctuating amount of S-Ranks to advance. And they're all HUGE. And some aren't even worth it! What do you get for perfecting all 600 stages? [[AWinnerIsYou Serperior, the supposed worst of the Gen V starters, Dugtrio, a 60 BP mon, and Shiny Genesect, which is still, you know, SHINY, which are incredibly rare normally, but it has Last-Ditch Effort, a nerfed version of Swarm..]]

** Landorus-Therian. Its superb Ground typing gives him a large amount of types he's super effective against, and he has a great base power of 80. However, what ''really'' makes him this is Risk Taker. With the introduction of Skill Booster, Risk Taker was changed from a mediocre skill to ''the'' skill you want something to have, as leveling the skill increases both the minimum and maximum damage, leading to a massive 8x multiplier at max level.\\
Same goes for Hoopa-Unbound. It has a superb 90 base power and the same ability, only made less interesting because its Dark-type offers less coverage. Still, it is a must-have against endgame Psychic or Ghost-type Pokémon.

** From the Special stages, we have Pirouette Forme Meloetta. The preset board consists of several Barriered Rocks and Pirouette Forme Meloetta icons which can be cleared in one move, breaking the Rocks surrounding it and clearing the rest of the Meloetta icons. Simple enough, but this leaves only two open columns for skyfall. In only very few moves after the stage starts, Meloetta will start disrupting with Rocks as well as Barriered Rocks. The worst disruption is the one where rows 2-4 are filled with nothing but Barriered Rocks plus a couple of Blocks and Meloetta icons between them, making it difficult to cause combos, let alone gain decent score. Mega Diancie is a must-have (both Diancie and its Mega Stone are event-only, natch) for this challenge because of this. But even then, RandomNumberGod is more likely to be against you, even if you used Attack Power ↑. Being an Ultra Challenge stage, difficulty like this is expected, but the way its disruptions work borders on annoyance and pretty much forces players to bring a fully-candied Pokémon as well as items.
* WhyFandomCantHaveNiceThings: Allegedly, the reason of 1,000-Coin limit for obtainable Coins in non-Special stages in the mobile version is due to [[GameBreaker a game-breaking exploit]] involving Meowth's stage (the Main one, obviously) where hackers can set Meowth's disruption countdown to 0 and, as the stage plays by itself due to Meowth constantly bombarding the puzzle area with Coins, said hackers can simply leave the game be until Meowth faints from the skyfall matches. Meowth's "torture" can be dragged out longer (thus rewarding more Coins) by using an [[CastingAShadow all-Ghost]] team, which Meowth's type resists. Some people are still not happy about this limit, [[BrokenBase though some others don't care or disagree with the former because they're already aware of the cash-grabbing nature of the mobile version.]] Fortunately, a mid-March 2016 Log In rewards the mobile players Coins based on how many Coins obtained above the 1,000-Coin cap in every instance that such thing happened, though the Coin limit is still there (albeit rather high at 3,000; keep in mind that this is not for event Meowth stages which already has a very high cap in the first place).

* TierInducedScrappy:
** Mega Pokémon:
*** Mega Banette, despite sharing the same Mega effect as Mega Mewtwo Y, is sadly not really reliable as a Ghost-type Mega. Its effect is overshadowed by [[GameBreaker Gengar's]], and it takes several more icons to Mega Evolve, even if it's stuffed full of Mega Speedups.
*** Mega Abomasnow is like Mega Lucario in terms of functionality, but with less coverage (4 weak to Ice vs. 5 weak to Fighting). Problem is, Abomasnow is a late game mon, and its Mega Stone can only be obtained from an even later-game stage. By then, when it comes to fighting Dragon, Flying, Grass or Ground Pokémon, there are simply far better alternatives for Megas.
*** Mega Venusaur and Mega Gardevoir share the same Mega effect and are considered unreliable due to how they work (erasing by column, when Mega effects that clear rows like Mega Lucario are more effective at combo-building).
*** Both [[ShockAndAwe Electric-type]] Megas, Manectric and Ampharos, are slow to Mega Evolve if not fully-candied and are heavily RNG-based.
*** [[ThisLooksLikeAJobForAquaman Mega Aerodactyl]]. Its Mega effect is so situational that only stages that heavily abuse Rocks and Blocks make it somewhat useful. Thankfully, its mega effect is one of the few where its low 60 base attack power doesn't hold it back too much.
*** Mega Scizor. While fans are glad for an alternate [[BigCreepyCrawlies Bug-type]] Mega at last, its Mega effect is identical to Mega Latios, which erases Pokémon in a jagged line horizontally and isn't reliable in combo-building nor disruption-cleaning.
*** Almost every Dragon-type Mega. Latias and Latios discourage combo-building (removing icons horizontally is borderine worthless); Mega Charizard X cannot build combos reliably, is horrible at disruption cleaning ''and'' starts out as a Fire-type in its base form; and Altaria only has 60 base power and an effect that is a marginally better version of Mega Audino's. All of them have extremely limited coverage, only being effective against Dragon-types, and are overshadowed by the [[GameBreaker game-breaking]] Rayquaza and Shiny Mega Charizard X.
*** Mega Sableye, as expected for an early Mega Pokémon thanks to its low base power. Its main problem is the O-shaped formation for clearing icons, which is never a good choice for easy combo-building and cleaning up disruptions efficiently. Its usage is excusable during the early game since you had a limited choice of Mega Pokémon , but once you get into the late game and unlock more Mega Pokémon, Mega Sableye is bound to be forgotten.
*** The [[NonElemental Normal-type]] Mega Pokémon have low base power, have no super-effective coverage at all, are resisted by three types (Rock, Steel, Ghost), and their presence only serves as an early introduction to [[SuperMode Mega Evolution]] and its basic Mega effects. Winking Mega Audino, however, is passable - having a similar effect to the likes of Banette, but being combinable with Silvally and Arceus for immensely boosted combo damage.
*** Mega Metagross suffers from the same problem Mega Charizard X's disruption does, in that it's an X that has practically zero use. It faces competition with Steelix, whose ability is designed to eat through metal blocks; Mawile, whose effect destroys icons in a much more useful formation, has access to Raise Max Levels to gain respectable power, and can be Skill Swapped for Risk Taker; and its own Shiny form, which boasts a Banette-like effect that only takes six icons to put online 'AND' the almighty Hammering Streak.
** Expert stage Pokémon:
*** Malamar is a Dark-type mon with 70 base power and Quirky+ as its Skill. Quirky is already rather difficult to trigger to begin with unless it's a match five (also, removing only two icons of itself in the case of Quirky+ is rather underwhelming). But the fact that there are still better 70 BP Dark-types out there with better Skills makes Malamar easily outclassed.
*** Porygon-Z shares the same base power as Porygon-2 (70), though instead of Crowd Power (an easier-to-activate version of Crowd Control), it has Shock Attack, which is a better version of [[StatusEffects Paralyze]]. Unfortunately, being a [[NonElemental Normal-type]], it won't see much use (unless it's forced).
*** The regular Rotom (other Rotom forms are event-only) is an early-game Expert mon with 60 base power. Quite literally, as it'll soon be outclassed by stronger [[ShockAndAwe Electric-types]] as the player progresses through the game.
*** Electrode is an [[ShockAndAwe Electric-type]] with base power of 60... which was introduced in a much later update. It's the first Pokémon to have Rock Break++ (may remove five Rocks on the board), but the average base power makes Electrode more than likely to be forgotten after being caught.
*** Much like the mainline games, Entei got the short end of the stick with the Johto legendaries. While it was originally outclassed by many things (including Moltres, which is obtained earlier) that share its type due to its mediocre ability, Skill Swappers arrived and gave it...Rock Break+. Rocks are considered to be an annoyance, but nothing worth fretting over unless there's so many that it makes it hard for abilities (such as Rock Break+) to activate. While it's still better than the rest of the mediocre abilities from Expert stages, the Skill Swapper that would be used to change Entei's skill would be put to far better use elsewhere.
*** Honchkrow forgoes its Flying type for Dark in this game, but brings 70 base power and the skill Power of 5+. However, it's unlocked pretty late in the Expert stages, which only serves to hurt it... because it's a long time after the player has battled the ''other'' big name Dark/Flying expert stage, Yveltal, who has base ''80'' power, can use [=RMLs=], has received a skill booster stage, and can swap its Power of 5 to the far superior Block Smash+.
** Skills:
*** Cheer. Useful in theory, useless in execution. It boosts the probability of a Skill being triggered in the next move by ''5%'', way too small to be useful. Also, trying to make a match-three to trigger this Skill is not a good option, having 60% activation rate, for a Skill that affects activation rate.
*** Opportunist, obviously, is a bottom-tier skill. It's only available on early-game mons and functions basically as a plain CriticalHit.
*** +/L/T-Boost. Sure those three Skills have 100% activation rate as long as the formation requirement in the match is met, but it's much harder to match in one of those formations than in a straight line, especially if the board is full of disruptions. Even the Skill buff[[note]]2x damage pre-patch[[/note]] (introduced on April 5, 2017) that made it on equal footing with the likes of Power of 4+ and other free triple-damage skills isn't enough to justify its use.
*** Both Heavy Hitter and Dragon Talon result in 1.5x damage if triggered, with Heavy Hitter being less reliable due to its much lower activation rate (20% less). Hyper Punch is the worse version of these two Skills: it results in triple damage when triggered, but even match-four and match-five still have a lower-than-average activation rate (50%).
*** Prank is rarely utilized by players because using this Skill pretty much means you have to gamble with RandomNumberGod. Prank sets the target Pokémon's disruption countdown randomly (between 1 and its possible maximum). The fact that it's also {{Nerf}}ed along with Mind Zap to make it unable to take effect on Pokémon with a status problem just makes it worse.
*** Counterattack[[note]]Damage +20 times the number of disruptions on board[[/note]] and Counterattack+[[note]]Same thing, but +100 instead of +20[[/note]]. Players would rather clean up disruptions rather than take advantage of them for extra damage. Just stick with Power of 4+, Dragon Talon, and the like for free damage boost.
*** Swat. It's free super-effective damage against Flying, Bug, and Fairy Pokémon! But good luck trying to trigger it in the first place if you're not going for a match-five. It's intended to give [[PsychicPowers Psychic-type]] Pokémon, normally neutral to those three types, some advantage (and possibly new team varieties), but the low activation rate (match-three and match-four) just ruins it[[note]]Boosting its Skill level just boosts damage instead of activation rate[[/note]]. It's often in the players' list of never-used Skills for this reason.
*** Brute Force. What's the point of bringing Pokémon whose type normally inflicts not-very-effective damage on certain types just so they can inflict neutral damage? It used to be a never-used Skill until an update gave it a GoodBadBug in the form of triple damage on ''any'' damage, including super-effective ones... only for said bug to be fixed shortly after, reverting it back into its pre-patch state.

* TheScrappy:
** Phione, because it can only be encountered at a Safari event and has the lowest possible encounter rate. To make matters worse, it used to be a mandatory obstacle in Mega Garchomp's original stage. Though the event has since replaced Phione with Suicune, the annoyance that comes with finding and catching Phione is still present.
** Ash-Greninja. Not because it's bad - it actually has a fantastic ability and respectable base power. It's hated because it has a ''massive'' amount of HP at 21060, is a timed stage, and has appeared roughly once every month since it first debuted. Reliably beating it without items is nearly impossible if you aren't skilled enough at time stages, meaning you'd have to be willing to shell out coins if you fail to catch it the first time. And if you want to level up its skill, you better be ''really'' good at timed stages, since it costs coins and requires far too many personal skill boosters to even get to level 2.
** Nihilego. You have to pay a whopping 20,000 Coins to attempt its stage, but its Skill and stats leave much to be desired. The hate was worse when it first debuted, costing the same amount of Coins ''per play'' before the Ultra Beast events were overhauled.
** Espurr and Squirtle, because their Start-of-Month Challenge rewards are bottom-tier (10 Hearts and 5,000 Coins, respectively), compared to other {{Mon}}s featured in said event (Skill Booster L and Mega Speedups).