I know the sleep discussion is over, but I just read through Finch's post and even though I know I shouldn't say shit, and I've seen people saying I should kms over my own bs, I thought I'd weigh in a little as a low ranked person/cart primary player.
I'm a tad surprised to see Sleep wholly banned as it was in Gen 5 -- but not for the same reasons. I fully understand council's decision and the community push back for it (Sleep and freeze are inherently uncompetitive, I wish we got Drowsy and Frostbite from PLA even though I do not like that game.) However, looking through it points to mainly two Pokemon; Darkrai and Valiant. Why is this relevant?
I've been around this metagame since day 1 of SV. I've lived through the terrors that were Bundle, Flutter, <><, cheems-poo, and the like. Valiant was always a contender for ban discussions. However, if you *ever* brought up Hypnosis sets back then, people would laugh at you, call you bad, and label the set as "bad" or "a meme". Yet, when Darkrai reappears in DLC2, suddenly everyone loses their minds over it and Val. Val was always an exceptionally strong Pokemon, and it wasn't until Darkrai because it's shenanigans that people took Hypnosis sets seriously.
I would've preferred to see Val and Rai get the hammer over full on Sleep, but I'm fine with what council did. It puts me into an awkward spot of "If I see these Sleep moves used on me on cart, do I just let it slide like before, or stop playing as if they spammed sleep on all my mons?" (Seriously, there's too many people who do this on cart. It's super tilting.) I'll have to see in the coming days, but this was quite the interesting development for me.
Also lol Kyurem suspect. I haven't played with it yet this gen, so I'll have to give it a go before I comment on it. Kyurem is kind of a diet Bax, IMO, as unlike Bax, Rem can be burned. Buuut it also has special sets and snow buff and yadda yadda... Gotta find a way to build around it to my style.