Competitive Pokemon History - Smeargle Quiz

Answer: Spore

Spore is the only sleep-inducing move with perfect accuracy to have ever existed in the game. Making one Pokemon totally useless for anywhere from 2-5 turns was a godsend, which gave Smeargle a unique niche in its debut generation as being able to use the move to support its team.

Answer: The ability to learn any move except for Self-Destruct and Explosion

Using its signature move Sketch, Smeargle can learn any move ever made except for moves which KO the user upon use, namely Self-Destruct and Explosion. Of course, Smeargle is way too frail to make use of its signature move when battling a legitimate, competitive fight, so using Sketch when playing single player to copy Smeargle's desired moves, and then taking these moves to a legitimate match, is how Smeargle best makes use of this trait.

Answer: 75 in Speed

With pathetic 20/20 stats for offenses and horrible 55/35/45 bulk, Smeargle's only viable function is as a supporting Pokemon, able to use its nearly limitless movepool to access unique support moves, such as Baton Pass, Belly Drum, Encore and Spore, to support its team. Base 75 in speed is rather poor, but it's barely enough for Smeargle to be effective at doing this, assuming it can function as a team's lead or receive a free switch in.

Answer: Own Tempo

Own Tempo grants the user an immunity to the Confusion status. Generally, confusion is a gimmicky, inconsistent strategy in competitive Pokemon and rarely ever sees practical use. Of course, since Smeargle's bulk makes it easy to simply kill off in, at most, two moves, an opponent is likely to just do exactly that rather than mess around and status it, meaning that Own Tempo was rather useless for Smeargle.

Answer: Focus Sash

With a Focus Sash, Smeargle could now guarantee that it would be able to survive even the mightiest of blows from full health. This, combined with its endless support movepool made Smeargle standard play's best overall suicide lead, and one of the game's better standard play support Pokemon in general.

Answer: Moody

Moody randomly reduces one stat by one stage while increasing another by two stages at the end of every turn. Sadly, Moody has consistently been banned from competitive play ever since its inception. Because of this, it is effectively useless for Smeargle.

Answer: FEAR

The acronym "FEAR" stands for Focus Sash, Endeavor, Attack, Rattata. It was clearly coined as it has been a comedic set that Rattata briefly became known for in the fourth generation. However, Smeargle, artist that it is, is able to portray this set in a genuinely viable way even in the Uber tier.

The idea is to Spore something, put up Trick Room (Focus Sash assures survival of one attack), claim the speed advantage in the process, then Endeavor something down to 1 HP and use a priority move, such as Ice Shard or Extremespeed, to watch some massively titanic Uber cover legendary fall to a level 1 Pokemon whose highest base stat is a double digit number.

The perfect way to assert your mental dominance over your opponent!

Answer: Being viable and legal in every single tier

Smeargle itself simply can't be argued as being overpowered in any metagame, with its paltry base stats and one dimensional role. However, its gargantuan support movepool makes it usable on hyper offensive teams of all kinds, in all metagames, securing it a niche in just about any competitive environment.

Answer: Magic Bounce

Defiant users, such as Bisharp, can profit off of Smeargle's presence, but only if Smeargle is tasked with setting up Sticky Web. They cannot stop Smeargle from doing its job of putting something to sleep and setting at least one layer of entry hazards. Magic Guard users are immune to entry hazard damage from Smeargle's entry hazards, but they also cannot stop Smeargle from achieving its goals to hinder their teammates.

Magic Bounce users, however, thwart Smeargle 100% of the time. Smeargle's support movepool consists predominantly of status moves, and since Magic Bounce prevents status moves from being used while the user is on the field, and 'bounces' said moves back towards Smeargle, Pokemon with this ability function as full counters to any Smeargle set conceivable. In particular, Mega Sableye is not even threatened by a Smeargle with Nuzzle, since paralysis is redundant given Mega Sableye's extremely poor base speed to begin with.

Answer: Dark Void

Dark Void suffered a series of nerfs. The highlight was its base accuracy being reduced to 55%, but as far as Smeargle is concerned, the main nerf was that any Pokemon other than Darkrai could no longer use the move without it simply failing to activate. Smeargle could still learn the move, but it would now do absolutely nothing.

While this may not seem like a big deal (all told, this was a rather niche issue anyway), as Spore seems to be strictly superior, Spore fails to work when used on Grass types or anything with the Sap Sipper ability. Prior to the seventh generation, a trainer expecting Smeargle to be matched up against a Grass type or Sap Sipper Pokemon would've given it Dark Void instead of Spore to accommodate for this.