Last night, PokéTuber shofu had a weird Double Battle interaction on his Twitch stream that no one could explain, myself included.
The timestamp for the battle starts
here, and the actual interaction happens on the
last turn of the battle.
Here's the scenario:
shofu has a Zen Mode Galarian Darmanitan w/ Lum Berry and Arcanine w/ Life Orb, both at below half HP. Darmanitan had just reverted back from its Dynamax.
His opponent, Roto, has a full HP Hitmontop w/o White Herb (used up) ready to finish Darmanitan off with Sucker Punch, plus an empty slot as Hitmontop is his last Pokémon.
It is Hailing, and there is Grassy Terrain.
Hitmontop uses Sucker Punch, "But it failed!"
This allows the Darmanitan and Arcanine to both connect with their respective Icicle Crash and Flare Blitz to KO Hitmontop and win the game for shofu.
But, hold on,
why did Sucker Punch fail? It didn't miss, just straight-up failed. Both Darmanitan and Arcanine used damage-dealing moves, so Sucker Punch should have worked on either of them.
At first, users in the chat brushed off this interaction as Roto misclicking and targeting his ally slot, messing up the Sucker Punch (sidenote: I didn't know this interaction was possible). However,
later in the stream, Roto tags shofu with the following tweet showing that he indeed targeted the Darmanitan with Sucker Punch, which generates a bit more discussion for the next few minutes.
twitter.com/rotomotorz/status/1204630015423369216
Am I missing something? The only explanations I've considered are Zen Mode shenanigans or updated Sucker Punch mechanics.
My inner wishlister wants to believe Ice-types in Hail negate positive priority now, like how Dark-types gained the Prankster immunity last gen.