Sweet Jesus
Neal and Jack and me, absent lovers...
To make it brief, I feel it's nice coverage options are both situational and redundant as none of them is unique in the psychics departement (uxie, mushy, mr.mime, xatu, jynx, kadabra).The sets of mesprit you've mentioned such as the SR support set or the trick scarf set (???) are not the most effective mesprit sets at all and if you are playing against people using these sets, chances are its not a very experienced player who is very predictable like you said. The calm mind mesprit set is extremely threatening and I believe it has niches over uxie for its power and wallbreaking abilities, with the risk that you send in a mon that is "bulky enough to tank a couple of psychics/pschocks/zen-headbuts" and have them bop you with coverage options such as hp fire or even hp ground. It has the bulk to set up on a lot of pokemon in this tier and it has always been effective for me using it for wall breaking purposes.
What I seriously don't understand is how you completely underrate the scarf set? I'd go as far as saying that mesprit is the best scarfer in this tier (my opinion) and is certainly the best pivot. It's a dream come true for offensive cores. While it doesn't necessarily break and kill everything in its path; It's not supposed to! It's there to force their threat out and get yours in whilst having the ability to clean late game against offensive teams and revive anyone one of your threats that may be weakened. And since mantine is less of a staple on teams, you can even run any sort of coverage move as your 4th depending on what your team needs. Psychic, u-turn, healing wish, t-bolt/e-ball/signal/hpfire/hpground.
As a conclusive point; I don't see how people haven't had quite the same experience as i have when using mesprit. I'm not sure on whether it's the team, the player or how they choose to use it, but for me it's always been a standout pokemon with certain niches that just cannot be compared to with the likes of uxie or xatu.
Also bare in mind I'm posting from experience and not theory mon, I would love to know other opinions on this fully but I 100% feel it should stay S.
Scarf's fast healing wish is nice, but the fact you have to come in exclusively to use healing wish (if you want it to be fast) makes a lot of nice plays impossible and often makes mesprit use healing wish as it's only move (with maybe one or 2 super weak u-turns). Not to mention even if it probably is the best scarfer, in my experience, most of the time, scarf is just plain bad in this meta where so much thnigs set up on weak attackers and where many sweepers have priority or double their speed and outspeed you anyway (klinklang, gorebyss, weather sweepers). In fact, with nothing common using dragon dance, only quiver dancers are revenged by scarf and both users outspeed scarf mesprit at +1 which means it's item's only purpose is to outspeed natural fast mons and a couple of slow shell smahsers. (Being choice locked is a very big price to pay just to outspeed things that can switch out and come back in later without losing any boosts)
I think I've covered a lot in my original post already, but yeah mesprit is just too well rounded to actually pose a serious threat like an S tier mon should. It does have loads of sets but they're all similar, often outclassed by another psychic type and can be guessed rather easily.
I might not have used mesprit as much as you, but I have used it and I haved faced plenty from good users.
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