Hello.
As a pretty active player in the Monotype community who does have some thoughts regarding sleep in this tier, I thought I'd just say my piece regarding this proposal of dropping Sleep Clause Mod in Official Metagames, which Monotype falls under.
I first made a post of sleep in the Monotype Metagame Discussion thread
here on Feb 27. I did not go into depth since it was mainly a post of mine to discuss the mons we needed gone at the time but I had found sleep to be an annoying presence to face against and I didn't feel particularly skillful when using it myself. I was following OU's steps of attempting things like Lead Darkrai on Mono Dark with Hypnosis and fitting Hypnosis on Iron Valiant on Fairy and Fighting teams as well. The conversation didn't get going but the one opposition I was met with was "tldr para is worse than sleep".
Jump to a month later, and this is where some actual discussion occurred regarding sleep. User
mushamu posted
here on March 24 suggesting sleep should be gone from SV Mono and all generations but the former part of the argument is more relevant here. The opinion of the playerbase in the thread to sleep was leaning towards leaving it alone but there were some players believing sleep should go as well, if you go on to read pages 10 and 11. The conversation seemed to die down when tier leader maroon posted
here saying some reasonings as to why Monotype's case with sleep is fundamentally different to OU and there also needs to be a "
high burden of proof" to change mechanics in the tier, which isn't present. Furthermore, maroon stated that we had more important things to deal with, which was somewhat true. We have banned Ursaluna-B and Chien-Pao from when that post was made, which has made significant changes to the metagame.
From this reception of sleep from a few months ago, I do not believe the Monotype community will be particularly thrilled if this proposal goes through. If you go through our discussion thread, there
is opposition to the tier just following what OU does. Example of this is a
post from user ArkenCiel, where he states:
"
I also want to add on that comparisons to OU don't even make sense when you consider the fact it is a different tier altogether. We can't constantly switch back and forth between "we're different tiers so we tier differently" and "OU did something right, let's do that too" whenever it's convenient to the case we're trying to make (insert Gouging Fire joke here). That decision by the OU council is received differently by the people, so their sacred ruling isn't really anything of note. What some may see as a progressive move, many others look to as a complete joke and a total failure by those shepherding the tier."
Something I feel like I have to say is that Monotype is different from usage-based tiering. We
have to use teams where each member share a type with one another, restricting us in the sense that the sort of teams you see, not every team is capable of running sleep. Only 6 of the 18 types can run Spore for example. Even if the other sleep inducing moves (Hypnosis, Sleep Powder, Sing) allow more than 6 types to utilise sleep, you still have to take into account that some of those mons simply suck in our metagame and they'll never see usage since you want to use the best mons of a particular typing when building or the type already has better ways of sleeping (Grass has Spore mons vs Sleep Powder). Some players feel like getting rid of sleep pretty much would shut down Grass, removing a notable option for them that can be unique to them. Poison would also lose Amoonguss Spore which can apply a lot of pressure for a type that isn't particularly offensive a lot of the time.
Even with these points that were made in our discussion thread, my stance has not changed. I still would like to see sleep banned in Monotype. I made a longer post
here outlining similar reasonings for OU getting sleep banned and I was simply not moved by the other side of the argument. What I would suggest is that the Monotype community
should handle sleep themselves without Tiering Admins getting involved, as I guess they would if this proposal is accepted. This will be a controversial idea for our playerbase and though I do understand for consistency's sake, every main tier should stop using the mod, it should be a case by case basis which takes the metagames into account to see if this is actually a necessary decision. I want sleep gone, but I've been fine playing the metagame for the past 3 months. Maybe this highlights the lower impact it has on our tier, who knows?
