Endless Battle Clause

[Hugendugen]

Some of you may be aware of a strategy going around that can force battles to continue indefinitely. This involves using Leppa Berry with Heal Pulse, Recycle, a healing move (such as Slack Off or Soft-Boiled) and Block/Mean Look/Spider Web. Fortunately only Slowpoke, Slowbro, Slowking, Blissey and Smeargle are legally able to use this combination (Ralts, Kirlia, Gardevoir and Gallade as well if you count Wish). To use the strategy, one of these will switch into a defensive Pokemon, or one unable to 2hko them, use Block and then PP stall the opponent with recovery and Leppa Berry + Recycle. Once the opponent begins to Struggle, the user can simply continue to Heal Pulse, with Leppa Berry + Recycle, until the opponent forfeits. An example can be seen here.

We've agreed that this strategy is not within the spirit of the game and have therefore decided to implement the "Endless Battle Clause".

Endless Battle Clause: Any moveset on any pokemon that is capable of intentionally causing an endless battle is banned from competitive play.

This will be implemented in all official Smogon metagames. The specific implementation of this clause will be left up to the Sim Admins, but we intend to be very targeted, to ensure that no otherwise legal competitive strategies are limited.

In the previously mentioned case, we will be banning the use of Leppa Berry, Heal Pulse, and Recycle on the same set. This is the only known strategy to force endless battles, but if you find any others, please let us know, and we will deal with those accordingly.


EDIT: as you'll see in the 3rd post, we ultimately decided simply to ban Leppa Berry + Harvest and Leppa Berry + Recycle.

 

[chaos]

For those too lazy to watch the replay, here is a tl;dr

shoutouts to Zultlol on reddit

 

[Hugendugen]

Since the clause was introduced, some helpful individuals pointed out a few similar strategies that could force endless battles. As a result, the following two combinations have also been banned:

1. Leppa Berry + Recycle + Pain Split - can be used by Mew, with almost exactly the same strategy as the Heal Pulse method, by simply using Pain Split to heal the opponent instead.
2. Leppa Berry + Recycle + Fling - can be used against a defensive Pokemon which struggles to do major damage, to prevent it from ever running out of PP, while the user simply heals off whatever damage it takes.

Thanks to ArkWelder and Pwnemon for pointing these out.

 

[Hugendugen]

As always, the creativity (and dickishness) of Pokemon players never ceases to amaze! You guys have come up with so many different ways to make this work that we'll be changing the ban a little bit. We will now simply be banning Leppa Berry + Harvest and Leppa Berry + Recycle. While I said that I'd like to be as non-intrusive as possible, there are just too many ways to create endless battles to be any more precise than this. Not to mention that there are very few legitimate competitive strategies involving these two combinations that don't try to force an endless battle. Of course, if you find some other obscure way to make this work, please let us know and we'll deal with it accordingly.