At face value, sleep had legitimate competitive use. For some Pokémon’s like amoonguss and torkoal, it could be used defensively.
for others like breloom, it could be used offensively.
this isn’t a replica of minimise/moody, which was pure cheese. It was possible to sack something to sleep, you can get immunity to powder moves, items like safety goggles exist, etc. in VGC there are clear examples of safety goggles/tera grass being used to deal with the prevalence of 75%+ accurate sleep.
any pokemon that ran sleep had to deal with only 3 remaining slots, and the counter play that existed.
Recently, something dark happened. Darkrai was introduced to OU as the 7th best dark type. People mocked darkrai, until it was discovered that darkrai could play slots at the casino, and could uniquely turn its 60% sleep into cheese and cause upsets. With a focus sash, it could fish for 2 for 1 trades.. or better!
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There is an important distinction about sleep, when compared to other thi. At a policy level, we had sleep clause to reign in the “power of sleep”.
In the infinite wisdom of the council, they assumed after many generations of sleep clause, it was time to retire it, and simply ban sleep. Because sleep became cheese on darkrai.
Therefore sleep was inherently broken on all pokemon. And sleep received the same ban hammer that other moves received.
there was no acknowledgement that we had no modern meta to test unrestricted sleep.
it would be fair to go from sleep clause to complete ban of sleep with actual evidence to support sleep being inherently uncompetitive without restriction.
however you were comparing restricted sleep.
restricted sleep only broke darkrai.
the decision to ban sleep completely, when the alternative was restricted sleep, therefore contradicted smogon general approach to banning things only if they’re broken on the majority of pokemon that access it.
this was reiterated numerous times before. But in this case it was ignored.
not arguing right or wrong here. You could have banned darkrai and potentially valiant if they were truly uncompetitive. Breloom, amoonguss, torkoal, etc are not uncompetitive with sleep clause.
for others like breloom, it could be used offensively.
this isn’t a replica of minimise/moody, which was pure cheese. It was possible to sack something to sleep, you can get immunity to powder moves, items like safety goggles exist, etc. in VGC there are clear examples of safety goggles/tera grass being used to deal with the prevalence of 75%+ accurate sleep.
any pokemon that ran sleep had to deal with only 3 remaining slots, and the counter play that existed.
Recently, something dark happened. Darkrai was introduced to OU as the 7th best dark type. People mocked darkrai, until it was discovered that darkrai could play slots at the casino, and could uniquely turn its 60% sleep into cheese and cause upsets. With a focus sash, it could fish for 2 for 1 trades.. or better!
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There is an important distinction about sleep, when compared to other thi. At a policy level, we had sleep clause to reign in the “power of sleep”.
In the infinite wisdom of the council, they assumed after many generations of sleep clause, it was time to retire it, and simply ban sleep. Because sleep became cheese on darkrai.
Therefore sleep was inherently broken on all pokemon. And sleep received the same ban hammer that other moves received.
there was no acknowledgement that we had no modern meta to test unrestricted sleep.
it would be fair to go from sleep clause to complete ban of sleep with actual evidence to support sleep being inherently uncompetitive without restriction.
however you were comparing restricted sleep.
restricted sleep only broke darkrai.
the decision to ban sleep completely, when the alternative was restricted sleep, therefore contradicted smogon general approach to banning things only if they’re broken on the majority of pokemon that access it.
this was reiterated numerous times before. But in this case it was ignored.
not arguing right or wrong here. You could have banned darkrai and potentially valiant if they were truly uncompetitive. Breloom, amoonguss, torkoal, etc are not uncompetitive with sleep clause.
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