you know i've been thinking about it and i'm really not sure whether sleep clause will really fix the problems everyone has been talking about in the suspect thread.



ph xern is commonly cited as a mon that sleep clause is necessary to keep in check, but i don't think sleep clause actually helps teams with less sleep protection in the matchup.



the best set, magma storm, can do two things here in particular: it can trap "answers" that lose to sleep turns and put them to sleep without fear of the opponent switching to absorb it, and it can trap more useless mons sent to absorb sleep (like soundproof zyg and ttar vs teams they don't do well vs) and take them out of the match altogether. it seems that if you don't have sleep protection, your answer needs to be able to withstand 3 turns of sleep + magma storm, and not even regenvest ogre can do that.



now let's move on to another mon that frequently uses sleep: triage ray with say, kiss/tg/moongeist. it's up vs a team with an answer that can lose to sleep: prank registeel. the registeel player has a mon that's relatively worthless and can be slept, like soundproof zyg. ray boosts to +3 as regi switches in. registeel switches to zyg on the lovely kiss.



now the regi player should be rewarded here for predicting correctly, but instead they are facing down a +3 ray with a dead weight mon on the field. regi is forced to switch in, and the ray user can click +3 moongeist into +3 oblivion wing (with +0 oblivion wing in case he lives and uses haze) to pick him off from disturbingly high percentages. the situation starts to look even more bleak if the ray has magma/sword/earth power.



if regi can somehow force out ray, it can consistently switch in and counter it. no issue there. that being said, there's another problem here: zyg isn't just dead weight at this point, it's a liability. as long as ray is alive, switching in zygarde in any situation puts you into a disadvantageous state. this isn't a big deal in the best-case scenario we outlined earlier, that being that zyg is not needed to check anything at all, but in practice this is almost never true.



overall, i'm not convinced that creating sleep clause will lead to a more competitive meta. multiple mons getting slept isn't the problem. a sleep ban might be the better solution here.