Board Thread:Episode Discussion/@comment-1599757-20151212162645/@comment-26397825-20151217000731

Mercury is too smart to make such a cocky mistake like that though; remember, he figured out Pyrrha's semblance after she used it twice on him. The same semblance that no one else seems to know unless she tells them.

It's far more likely that he purposefully took her aura - and his own by the way, since he wasn't on full aura when she went Saiyan - down enough that she wouldn't be knocked out, and when she used her semblance against him she would completely take out the rest of his aura. This then allowed them to pull off the framing, and get her out of the way for more than just a few nights as she recovered from the fight.

I really don't want it to be the case that Yang won by luck again; I want her to have every reason to lose, but to have been set up to win so she can lose harder in a different way. I want the bad guys to actually be smarter and stronger than the good guys, so they have a reason to push themselves to be stronger and struggle.