To clarify this since I don't know if I explained it well enough in the previous post:
We're not "suddenly looking into sleep". We've effectively taken a decision at the start of every generation that unfettered sleep will be restricted to the "nerfed" version of Sleep Clause, and that means we've already been forced to take action on the sleep mechanic. The reason I'm bringing it back up is because I think that the clause has existed for so long that we've lost sight of why it was introduced in the first place - limiting defensive mons to one sleep works decently, and limiting offensive threats that are otherwise unappealing to one sleep also works because you're basically trading one dead (but still alive) for another dead slot (imagine doing anything useful with Breloom after its already Spored something). Since the sleep users from old gens all fit one of these molds (or the third one I mentioned where they're mons that are designated to break everything without needing to sleep anything), playing with Sleep Clause in old gens gives the impression that the nerf at least "works" for preventing the aspects of unrestricted sleep that made it broken all those years ago. Gen 9 threw us multiple sleep users that fit a new mold - the three mons I talk about throughout the post (not just Darkrai) are strong, genuinely fast, already decent offensive mons before factoring in sleep, and can function well enough with the reduced coverage to easily run a sleep set. As it turns out, offensive mons that start off as decent without sleep, become actual potential issues with a sleep move.
As I also said in the other post, we did get to see a solid 2 weeks of Darkrai in action where basically no one on the high ladder thought Hypnosis was good, and this is what led to it being called midrai in the first place - it was legitimately worse than Ting-Lu, Gambit, Moon, Meowscarada, Weavile, and probably Samu-H too as a dark type during those first two weeks, and in the last week it has maybe skipped over two of those mons (mostly it went from being an honest mon to cheese though). I think the narrative that has been created around this situation shows two things:
1) People are really distrustful of former Ubers. I mean, Darkrai is just an honest little guy, he has dreams like the rest of us (ok im sorry). Jokes aside, the gap between where Darkrai was at when people weren't using sleep, to the way people talk about it now should raise some alarm bells about sleep and the effectiveness of Sleep Clause. I think people would see the huge jump from mid B rank level mon to broken candidate much more easily if they weren't still holding onto the idea that an old Uber simply has to have something special over a modern OU pokemon. Personally the standard I like to use when I need to figure out if a new fast special attacker is broken is the Dragapult test - would I struggle to handle this more than I currently struggle to handle Boots Pult and Specs Pult in the same conditions. In the case of Darkrai I quickly arrived at the answer "no this is not more scary than Pult" during the 2 week period mentioned earlier where Hypnosis wasnt a thing to worry about.
2) People have not been facing Lilli-H. Sleep Powder Lilli on sun is getting insane value pretty consistently, with recent trends on high ladder sun teams focusing more on offensive power over the old sun teams with more backbone. This shift in the sun archetype, as well as the Triple Axel buff and the downturns of Defensive Ghold, Zapdos, and even Moltres to an extent have allowed Lilligant to go nuts - it fits really snugly onto this style of team as a way to punish early Tera Waters against Wake/Gouging Fire while acting as an extra breaker/speed control option that can sleep physdef walls like Skarm for common teammates like Gambit. As someone who's been keeping track of the performance of both sleep Lilli-H and HypnoRai, my assessment is that Lilli-H is more consistent at having a high performance game, while Darkrai is more likely to outright 6-0. This recent trend was enough to blow the idea of Darkrai being the problem out of the water for me - it's the main thing that made me look into the differences between Gen 9's sleep users and old gen sleep users in the first place. Admittedly, I have been deliberately cagy about exact details of what Lilligant is doing right now, that's mostly because it's not my place to reveal other players' alts or showcase their work, so you're just gonna have to trust my explanations of how Lilligant operates and why it's so damn effective (in a cheesy way) right now.
Now for something that is tangentially related to this being bigger than Darkrai - CM HypnoHex Valiant isnt just cheese fish nonsense, it is legitimately one of the top Valiant sets right now, and a large part of the reason for this is because it's a spin-off of a common Valiant blueprint. CM Booster Energy Valiant has been able to work with Moonblast + Shadow Ball coverage for a while now, and in the past we've seen various picks from its utility movepool used to supplement this coverage. Three of the most dangerous variants of this blueprint featured Encore/Taunt/Substitute as the last move with slightly different use cases:
Encore gives Valiant more opportunities to set up, + it allows Valiant to Terastalize more freely without being automatically revenge killed by Sucker Punch.
Taunt allows Valiant to wear down certain defensive mons like Gliscor/Toxapex/Skeledirge which would otherwise be able to put a dent in Valiant's sweeping potential.
Substitute mixes some aspects of both, losing the ability to wear down some of the defensive mons that I mentioned, but keeping the ability to dodge Sucker Punch.
Then we have HypnoHex Val - which has some of these non-luck based advantages such as dodging Sucker Punch and smashing Gliscor with Tera Ghost Hex, while maintaining the potential to break through Pex/Dirge/Spdef Corv which the other variants really struggle to do. Without factoring in HypnoHex, every time you add a CM Valiant to your team you are forced to make a building decision about what matchups you want to smash, what matchups you want to be ok in, and what matchups you're okay with being useless against. It's a legitimate skill-based decision that can tell you something about how good of a builder someone is. HypnoHex Val on the other hand, is basically taking matchups that the Valiant user has decided not to cover, situations where Val would have practically 0 chance of breaking, and offering a chance (sometimes 20 percent, sometimes 40 percent) that u actually win this matchup instead.
This is a big issue that people are missing when they talk about the non-awful offensive sleep users - running sleep trades in the concept of making decisions that balance your matchup spread, in favour of getting a much wider matchup spread (even if some of it needs luck). Meanwhile, the only way that the opposing player will ever get to cash in on these decisions is to get lucky enough to not get lucked. In some cases, the combination of setup + coverage + sleep has the potential to cover so much ground in the meta that the only reasonable counterplay from the other end is to beat them in the luck minigame. This also marks a big difference between Sleep and other forms of RNG - even the most relevant para users like Home/DLC 1 Zapdos generally aren't able to force decent odds to break past their defensive answers. Even if Zapdos ran into a Gking with no supplementary counterplay, it's still harder for Zapdos to Twave Hurricane its way through a Gking than it is for a Darkrai/Iron Valiant to hit a Hypnosis and then get through basically anything with a 2 or 3 turn sleep. Part of managing RNG in this game is that you usually get to make choices that can affect how much RNG you have to deal with. I know players that would never use Hydro Pump unless the mon in question doesnt learn Surf - but a decent Hypnosis user can break designated checks with a 2 turn sleep, which means that the Hypnosis user can force their way through sturdy checks at the same odds as a Hydro miss. 40 percent odds to break through a regular answer, or 20 percent odds to break through strong answers, is a high percentage compared to other situations where you are forced to deal with RNG.
To circle back to the original points, I don't think that Sleep Moves Clause should be treated as "extra action". In my view, the premise of "why should we ban an entire status" is faulty - we're messing with the intended mechanic of sleep either way, so the focus should be on the pros and cons of Sleep Clause vs Sleep Moves Clause as a solution to unrestricted sleep. My honest assessment of the main changes from Sleep Moves Clause is as follows:
- Darkrai/Iron Valiant/Lilli-H go from borderline broken cheese to honest mons that are basically guaranteed to stay in the meta
- Amoonguss goes from its current ranking to somewhere in C. This is based off of the utility of its typing and Toxic, as well as its proven use case on DLC 1 stall (where it runs Toxic over Spore). It also loses any cheese associated with Red Card + Spore.
- Breloom goes from its current ranking to unviable (still the best featured shitmon of all time though)
- Venusaur stays about the same (prefers extra coverage to sleep moves anyway)
- Ninetales gets a tiny bit worse (though I think its niche is mostly contained in the instant dual screens + weather resetting + snow setting)
- Venomoth gets fucked (get owned
hellom)
- Torkoal gets a bit worse if the ban is done in the same way as Sleep Moves Clause in other metas, since Yawn gets banned (Tork would likely switch over to Will-O-Wisp which it has run before on some teams)
For me, this is an easy net positive change when you compare this to the tradeoffs made with Sleep Clause. Originally, the idea behind Sleep Clause was that you could nerf sleep well enough that the annoying aspects of it wouldn't be worth complaining about, while still being able to preserve the niches of mons that relied on sleep. Regardless of whether this is enough reasoning to justify a nerf instead of a ban, the reasoning itself is much less applicable nowadays when there's 3 A-/B+ level mons that are causing problems due to sleep (Lilli is super underranked because word haven't traveled on the recent Lilligant suns yet), while the mons that might be screwed over by a sleep ban are increasingly irrelevant. At this point, even banning one of Darkrai or Valiant in order to preserve Sleep Clause literally takes more away from the metagame than replacing Sleep Clause with Sleep Moves Clause, which would kinda defeat the point of having Sleep Clause in the first place.
, 
and 
and in some cases electric-types, it has not much counterplay. however, 3 and 4 are missing - the chance of being fulpara'd is just 30%, which is going to give your opponent a few free turns in the game, yes, but overall youre likely to break through more turns than not. this makes paralysis not overbearing and not that hurtful to the target.
ice beams on a game to get frozen, and if you get hit by that many your team probably died from the damage anyways. its just not a big enough chance to where it affects enough games, sometimes you get haxxed but you wont more often than you will.
viable so theres no arguing here.
that runs inaccurate sleep; 
and 
do that too, among others mentioned in the opening statement. spore is definitely a useful move on every pokemon that can use it. you could remove one sleep abuser and the next one would take its place - its not a matter of the mon being broken, because it is a *majority* of viable pokemon that its broken on, which i believe to be the deciding factor on whether a strategy is broken or if its just the mons that use it.
