This is not something I agree with. I do think VGC in general may have the more balanced pokemon experience but we are a community that aims to find a balance for competitive singles. I at least still think this is possible and support the removal of certain egregious luck elements like Ohko and evasion
What I don't understand is why the burden still falls on sleep when it is still only a small selection. 'Multiple' is vague and really only means more than 1. Could you have argued for a Protosynthesis ban when we had Roaring Moon and Flutter Mane in Ubers (or could we do it again if RM gets banned again?) I know again this is talking about 'uncompetitiveness' and not 'broken-ness' but there is no valid precedent here. Even with Baton Pass, you could easily argue a large majority of pokemon are uncompetitive with the move. Here it is only 3 (mayybe 4) users of sleep out of a close to 100 possible users.
Again I think that something like this was in place at one point. Either way, this is a false equivalency. OHKO moves getting only 1 possible KO per game and only having 1 valid Evasion booster would still be ludicrously uncompetitive and even debatably broken on even poor users of the mechanics. These clauses would not solve the inherit issues of OHKO and Evasion. This would be a very poorly thought out clause if implemented and a reason why you don't see a clause like this (aside from the general distate for clauses)
Sleep Clause has given us several generations of balanced OU. For these generations, we largely determined that sleep was compatible with a competitive metagame. Really the argument I would like to see why sleep is no longer inherently compatible with a current metagame. Why is it that sleep is uncompetitive on mons that are not directly adjacent to Darkrai, Iron Val... So far we have no reason to believe that it is sleep that is the issue and not a few bad actors.
knows your location
thanks to regaining triple axel, weavile is much more splashable than before and has a much easier time forcing tera water on gliscor. if something else on the team has tera'd, weavile is an offensive hard-counter to gliscor and can even use its protect turns to set up
for some reason, meowscarada also gets triple axel. (i'm not complaining, it just doesn't make much sense to me flavor-wise.) this lets it threaten gliscor similarly to weavile, with the added bonus of being able to hit it really hard with flower trick after tera water
primarina might fall out of ou eventually, but it's still a legitimately usable thing and i'm absolutely here for it. liquid voice psychic noise has the benefit of not only heavily denting gliscor but also preventing poison heal from working for a couple turns, so even if it does decide to tera, it still has to briefly deal with the fact that entropy exists. if gliscor's running knock off over toxic, psychic noise draining kiss primarina is actually capable of stalling out gliscor if it teras
lead darkrai forces a 50/50 onto lead gliscor—if gliscor protects turn 1, it can nasty plot and proceed to start going wild; if it doesn't, darkrai can click the funny cheese move and potentially let gliscor get knocked before getting poisoned later in the game. because of how dangerous giving even a single free turn to darkrai is, this is one of the only lead matchups that gliscor might not want to just automatically turn 1 protect on. also, other darkrai sets that carry ice beam give gliscor a lot of trouble, as strong special attackers with ice moves tend to do
heavily dependent on the set and positioning, but deo-s can solidly beat gliscor sometimes. if you lead with nasty plot deo-s and they lead with gliscor, gliscor will always protect turn 1 expecting knock off, so that's just a free plot and it's forced to tera or switch to avoid the incoming ice beam. ice beam sets in general are bad for gliscor, especially if something else on the team has burned tera. also, skill swap is a very niche option on deo-s that is incredibly situational and usually bad but can work hilariously well against gliscor
this doesn't do jack shit against gliscor offensively, but it hard-walls the eq/toxic set, which means you can just either whirlwind it out (if you're carrying that), pp-stall it, or wait for it to give up and switch, then deal with it later after putting yourself in a better position to
i mean you just kinda sub and then click the leaf storm button, not exactly a grand strategy behind this one
THE BIG ONE. i saved the best for last here—kyurem is the offensive gliscor answer. physical sets force tera water to avoid being slaughtered by icicle spear, then get ddanced on during their protect turns and slaughtered by scale shot anyway. special sets just click freeze-dry and kill it whether it goes tera water or not. this matchup is practically unwinnable unless gliscor runs a different ice-resisting tera than water, and most of those get bonked by earth power, the one exception being… tera ice. and no one wants to be the person running tera ice gliscor
sand is the only weather gliscor isn't really worried about and it didn't get anything to directly contend with gliscor, but the return of excadrill means we have one more hazard remover, which means one more opportunity to undo gliscor's spikes progress. it's not much on its own, but even the small indirect nerfs add up. also, sand is by far the least relevant weather right now, which means that when a form of weather is up, it's most likely gonna be something that fucks over gliscor somehow
hail got kyurem, gliscor's worst matchup. not much to say here that wasn't already said earlier, kyurem claps gliscor six ways from sunday. alolan ninetales itself has also seen a bump in usage because of kyurem, and any mon with access to freeze-dry is a mon gliscor is very scared of
sun went from being a regular-sized problem for gliscor to a massive problem. in dlc1, walking wake was a terrible matchup for it already, but sun itself wasn't super popular for a number of reasons. now it's back in full force, bolstered by the new protosynthesis mons and the return of volcarona and roaring moon. despite not particularly liking the prospect of being stalled out by toxic/protect or having to eat an earthquake, all of those mons are threatening to gliscor on some level thanks to their setup capabilities as well as their ability to just hit it neutrally really fucking hard. and of course walking wake is still there, giving the exact same amount of problems to gliscor as before but more likely to have sun behind it
yes, gliscor can tera water to deal with rain's setters and water-type abusers. but those aren't the reason that rain got popular all of a sudden. the one doing the heavy lifting on that front is archaludon, which can massively punish gliscor after a tera with electro shot. if gliscor doesn't tera, it just kinda gets run over by the rest of the rain team
