Dragapult Ex Ignoring Manaphy’s Ability (no canceling cologne)

RayAndYuki · May 27

So I’ve been in a match with someone trying out Dragapult Ex and they already had Manaphy in their bench. I used Phantom Dive expecting the benched pokemon to be protected by the ability and to my surprise I landed damage on all the pokemon I haphazardly placed counters on.

Manaphy’s ability explicitly states “Prevent all damage done to your Benched Pokémon by
attacks from your opponent’s Pokémon.” Does this mean Manaphy’s ability can’t do anything against moves that say “place damage counters on opponent’s Pokémon”?. I assume this is a bug since damage counters that originate from my Dragapult Ex’s Phantom Dive would be considered damage.

I was planning on copy pasting the battle log but I accidentally copied text from elsewhere so my apologies. Hopefully this isn’t a repeat post of this report, and to clarify like in the title I did not have any Pokémon abilities that deactivate opposing abilities or the use of Canceling Cologne.

NeoAir · May 28

Damage is not an effect. Manaphy prevents only damage but not damage counters which is an effect with Dragapult’s attack. The easiest way for this meta is attaching Mist Energy to counter Dragapult. You should read the description in attack box or ability box very carefully to discriminate between effect and damage.

OlderAngel11 · May 28

The wording is very tricky here. Dragapult places damage counters, while manaphy prevents damage from being done. It is a very specific and seemingly odd mechanic, but this is just the way it works.