Smeargle Can Learn Almost Every Move in the Game
One move, Sketch, copies whatever it just saw — permanently. No other Pokémon comes close to its movepool.
Smeargle is a dog with a paintbrush tail, a base stat total of 250, and no good stats anywhere. It also has, by an enormous margin, the largest movepool of any Pokémon ever released — and it gets there with a single move.
How Sketch works
Sketch copies the last move the target used and replaces Sketch with it. Permanently. Not for the battle, not until you switch — the move is gone from Smeargle's set and the copied one is there instead, saved to the file.
Smeargle learns Sketch repeatedly as it levels, which means it can perform the trick several times over and end up holding four moves it has no business knowing. Signature legendary moves, moves exclusive to one line, moves that no tutor or TM will ever teach — if Smeargle has watched it happen, it can keep it.
Why it is not overpowered
Because Smeargle cannot use any of it. Its Attack is 20 and its Special Attack is 20 — near the bottom of the entire roster. Handing it the most devastating attacking move in the game produces an attack that still does almost nothing.
| Attack | 20 |
|---|---|
| Special Attack | 20 |
| Speed | 75 |
| Base stat total | 250 |
So the design balances itself in an elegant way: unlimited access, no ability to exploit it directly. What Smeargle actually does in competitive play is set up — sleep, entry hazards, stat boosts passed to something that can hit — because its value was never the damage. It is the only creature in the game whose entire contribution is knowing things.
The dex was describing this the whole time
“Smeargle marks the boundaries of its territory using a body fluid that leaks out from the tip of its tail. Over 5,000 different marks left by this Pokémon have been found.”
Five thousand distinct marks. The entries are careful about this — Crystal notes the colour of the fluid is predetermined for each individual Smeargle, so the marks are not random, they are signatures. Somebody in-universe has catalogued five thousand of them.
That is the same idea as Sketch, told as flavour instead of mechanics: a creature defined entirely by copying and marking, whose output is enormous variety and whose own contribution is a tail and some paint. The gimmick and the lore are the same gimmick, and they were written that way from the start.
Sources
- Sketch move description and mechanics — official game data
- Pokémon Ruby / Emerald — Smeargle Pokédex entry
- Pokémon Gold / Crystal — Smeargle Pokédex entry
- Smeargle base stats — official game data
Quoted Pokédex entries are reproduced from the games named above for commentary. Every number in this article was checked against the species' official data before publishing.
