Competitive Pokemon History - Sableye Quiz

Answer: 75 in Attack and Defense

With a meager 75 in Attack, Sableye was not by any means imposing as a physical attacker. With a 75 in Defense, it also was easily 2HKOed by any moderately strong physical attack. That horrid base 50 HP did nothing to help that fact. With a putrid 65 for Special Defense, nobody mistook Sableye as the second coming of Blissey, per se. Finally, a base 50 for Speed was just awful. It would outspeed just about nothing of relevance on offensive teams, and it needed significant investment in Speed to outrun defensive Pokemon, who ran no investment in Speed themselves.

Even with Sableye's impressive typing and movepool, it was thoroughly undermined by awful all around stats.

Answer: Zero

It is completely impossible to hit Sableye super effectively in any game that came out before the sixth generation. Dark is weak to Bug and Fighting, which are both promptly covered up by Ghost. Ghost is weak to itself and Dark, which are both resisted by Dark and offset. Thus, Sableye's lack of weaknesses gave birth to a flat out incredible defensive set which shaped the third generation NU meta around it and forced trainers to account for it when teambuilding.

The fact that one could about count the serious third generation NU tournaments on two hands did cause this fact to not be of terrible importance, but at least Sableye was good somewhere.

Answer: Keen Eye

Keen Eye renders the user immune to accuracy-dropping effects, such as Sand Attack or the accuracy reducing side effect of Mud Bomb. This ability saw absolutely zero practical use due to the complete absence of accuracy reducing moves, mainly due to the fact that they can be foiled by just switching out to reset the losses, and that they don't generate any particular momentum with any consistency. Thus, Keen Eye was a useless ability, and it was unfortunately Sableye's only ability in the third generation.

Answer: Spiritomb

Spiritomb was far bulkier than Sableye, sharing the same miserable 50 HP but having far higher 108/108 Defense and Special Defense. Its 92 Attack and Special Attack weren't breaking down walls like nothing, but they were at least high enough to make offensive sets genuinely decent and worth exploring. Having access to mostly the same moves Sableye had, while having an ability that actually does something in Pressure meant that Spiritomb would end up completely outclassing Sableye at doing pretty much anything, banishing it to completely obsolete and unusable depths in the fourth generation.

Answer: Prankster

Prankster grants +1 priority to all status moves, such as Recover, Will-O-Wisp, Calm Mind, Taunt and more. This had such a profound effect on Sableye that it became a staple on standard play balance teams, became very useful on defensive teams, and could even make the occasional appearance on offensive teams for its amazing utility. Even in Ubers, the ability to get off a priority Will-O-Wisp to cripple a physical attacker which could otherwise get out of control was absolutely game changing. Priority on all of these useful moves also completely rendered its terrible Speed a non problem.

Its low Defense was also heavily mitigated from the fact that Sableye could burn most physical attackers before they could move, and could greatly cushion the retaliating blow as a result. Simply put, this new ability caused an uprising that not many other Pokemon have enjoyed across history, and firmly put Sableye on the competitive map for the first time.

Answer: Arceus-Normal

The three incorrect answers represented Pokemon who were actually totally resilient to Sableye's bag of tricks, and would run it over like nothing.

Extreme Killer Arceus, however, had nothing it could do to stop Sableye from totally invalidating it. Most of Extreme Killer Arceus' biggest checks, close to being counters themselves, could be foiled if Extreme Killer Arceus brought a specific, unexpected move to hit them with. For example, Skarmory cannot even check Extreme Killer Arceus if it packs Overheat, whereas it counters E-Killer otherwise. The same can be said about Ho-Oh vs E-Killer if E-Killer brought Stone Edge, Landorus-T vs E-Killer with Ice Beam, and so on.

Sableye, however, has zero weaknesses to exploit, meaning E-Killer cannot simply equip a coverage move to swat it away with. Moreover, Sableye can even defeat E-Killer if it switches in on the turn E-Killer boosts with Swords Dance. Sableye holds a crucial immunity to Extremespeed, and can easily shrug off a Shadow Claw, Stone Edge or Earthquake after burning E-Killer with priority Will-O-Wisp. Should E-Killer just try to boost with Swords Dance again to negate the burn, Sableye will drop it in one clean hit with Foul Play.

This distinction is largely what gave Sableye tons of wings in Ubers, as the only Pokemon who can reliably counter Extreme Killer Arceus without having to worry about a certain coverage move ruining its attempt to do this.

Answer: Fire

Fire types are immune to Will-O-Wisp, and most of them are special attackers anyway, and can easily deal with Sableye by overwhelming it with strong attacks. In Ubers, Blaziken, Reshiram and Arceus-Fire can setup all day on Sableye, or easily destroy it with their strong attacks.

In standard play, Volcarona is a very deadly threat to be hard countered by, so Sableye would need a strong backbone to defend against this via a teammate. In UnderUsed, Darmanitan and Victini would steamroll it with their extremely strong moves. All of these Pokemon bear the same trait in common, that they cannot really be hindered in the slightest by anything Sableye does to them, and that is because of their Fire typing. Thankfully, bulky Water types are incredibly common in all three of these metagames, and because Fire types are weak to the incredibly common Stealth Rock, this major weakness was quite easy to account for, meaning it didn't hinder Sableye's viability as much as it would otherwise.

Answer: Magic Bounce

In addition to this new goodie, Mega Sableye also receives an extremely large buff to its defenses, with a 125 for Defense and 115 for Special Defense. Combined with its ability to reflect entry hazards and status moves, Mega Sableye is capable of completely and easily shutting down defensive utility Pokemon, including a set of prominent characters like Ferrothorn, Skarmory, Jirachi, Bronzong and more.

Its added Defenses also make it far better at taking on offensive teams, easily checking the likes of Gengar, Latios, Latias, Chandelure, most Rotom formes, and certain variants of Reuniclus.

This made Mega Sableye into even more of a standard play superstar, being unquestionably a top ten Pokemon in sixth generation standard play.

Answer: Ubers

A whole three days before the sixth generation ended, Mega Sableye actually got banned to Ubers! This meant that, exclusive to itself, Mega Sableye got to enjoy a large period of dominance in standard play before being officially labelled as a Pokemon native to the Uber tier, which was just a large boon to its already gushing competitive profile.

The general argument behind Mega Sableye's eventual dismissal from standard play was that it made stall teams far too good by reliably shutting down the majority of entry hazard setting strategies, and thus, making it far too easy for Pokemon like Chansey and Skarmory to switch in. In a controversial voting period, 61.7% of qualified voters banded together to send Mega Sableye off to Ubers. However, it had a large period of time to firmly establish itself in standard play, as well as not being too shabby even in Ubers, where it was definitely viable to begin with. Thus, it was far from hamstrung, and if anything, was empowered by the collective decision to ban it.

Answer: Prankster no longer worked on Dark type Pokemon

Prankster moves of all kinds would now fail if they directly targeted a Dark type Pokemon. Like Fire types, this meant Dark types could now walk all over base Sableye like nothing- they were even resistant to Foul Play and Knock Off to boot. Thus, Sableye fell all the way to PartiallyUsed, alongside it's old rival Spiritomb.