Effective immediately, Sketchmons will be implementing Sleep Moves Clause​



Hi everyone, Eggs here on the behalf of the Sketchmons council. Like many other formats, we are becoming WOKE and CANCELLING Sleep moving away from the old Sleep Clause Mod for a few reasons. Some of these are metagame-specific, but a few of the justifications for this decision are entirely mechanical and ideological in nature. With the Sleep Moves Clause implementation comes a few other changes: namely, the removal of Sleep Clause Mod and the unrestricting of Lovely Kiss, Sleep Powder, and Spore. With all that out of the way, here's a fleshed-out justification of Sleep Moves Clause, and outside of the first point these arguments are valid in a majority of tiering scenarios.



1. Sleep was already kinda banned in Sketchmons.

Spore has always been restricted in Sketchmons (for obvious reasons), and Sleep Powder and Lovely Kiss were restricted alongside it at the beginning. The three most reliable methods of inflicting sleep have been limited to their native learners for the entirety of the metagame's history, and Sleep has seen little usage as a Sketched move as a result. At the moment, the only Sleep inducers worth mentioning are Venusaur and Amoonguss, one of which struggles to fit Sleep Powder in its moveset, and the other only sees usage because it can learn Spore. Seeing either of these Pokemon put something to sleep is rather rare, which raises an important question: Is this functionally different than effectively just banning sleep? And in practice, the answer is no. Sleep is effectively a non-factor in the majority of Sketchmons games, and leading into my second point, in the games where it does show up, it really showcases why we shouldn't keep it around.



2. Sleep is uncompetitive and unfun.

This is a dead horse but I take great pleasure in beating it anyway. Sleep has always been a questionable (if not outright awful) mechanic, and removing it from our competitive game is almost always going to be a net positive. When a Pokemon is put to sleep, it is effectively useless unless it is carrying Sleep Talk (which is unreliable, takes up a moveslot, and is also heavily RNG dependent) or has a teammate with Heal Bell (often difficult to fit onto teams). With a single move, your opponent has effectively removed your Pokemon from the match, severely limiting how your team responds to whatever threats your opponent has. Sure, you could spend somewhere between 1 and 3 turns staying in until the Pokemon wakes up, but the difference between 1, 2, and 3 turns of sleep is immense and can often determine the outcome of a match. No other status move (remove freeze too btw) has this much of a chokehold on gameplay, especially one as negative as this.



3. Why the hell do we have Sleep Clause Mod anyway?

This is especially ironic coming from an OM Mashups dweeb, but how did we get away with a gameplay mod like this? Sleep Clause Mod as a solution to sleep abuse is a very odd solution, and one that (as @UT said a while ago) would be dismissed outright if it was suggested today. Instead of implementing any ruleset changes, our predecessors just added a single, very specific gameplay mod that activates if a player tries to put a second Pokemon to sleep, effectively making the game enforce a gentlemen's agreement. This is somewhat analogous to modifying the game so that Paralysis can no longer fully paralyze Pokemon, i.e. balancing a mechanic by modding it instead of banning it, which is somewhat obviously not the right decision.