Speaking of Parallel City and Ninetales, what if the Parallel City deck has Hex Maniac to lock Ninetales PRC's ability so they can cancel out Skyfield and force the opponent to discard 5 bench pokemon out of 8 despite Ninetales being in play? If the lock is based on ability, Hex Maniac can break that lock... Therefore, when XY8 is released, I expect Metal Ray decks to fall down by a tier or maybe two. After all, Hex Maniac = Inability to use Metal Links or any other abilities, including stadium-locking 'Tales = Autoloss to Vileplume/Giratina-EX, MalaTile(or M Sceptile-EX/Malamar-EX), among other decks that either Item/Stadium lock and/or use turn attachments/Ariados AOR before Hex Maniac is used in order to inflict significant special conditions to the MRay user AND weaken the foe's chief attack while piling on energy while doing damage at the same time. In the case of MalaTile, the only solution to that is to hope your sleep flip results in MRay waking up immediately, and then, regardless of flip, Paint Roller or Skyfield to cancel out the Parallel City effect, Super Rod Shaymin-EX back into deck, Winona/Ultra Ball Shaymin-EX back in play, then, if MRay is not in play or if he can't retreat due to MRay still sleeping as a result of the sleep flip going south(or resulting in tails), attach a Float Stone to Shaymin-EX before using a Switch if MRay is either not in play, or is still asleep(in which case, he can't retreat anyway, so the only recourse would be to use Switch to get him back to the bench in his sleep, and cure the sleep as a result), then shaymin-EX can retreat to get MRay back in active, and ready to Emerald Break after a lot of resetting after the prior status-infliction followed by the Hex Maniac and Parallel City putdown that threatened to cripple MRay had the plan held...
Then again, with the release of information regarding a crippling stadium and Hex Maniac to make it more crippling to Ninetales PRC's role, if Items were locked too, maybe Expanded won't be kind to MRay any longer, with Lasers, the above cards minus Hex Maniac, if Plume/Giratina had Lasers in Expanded, if M Rayquaza-EX is put to sleep and doesn't wake up ASAP, and the Laser plus Paint Roller was used prior to Vileplume entering play so that the Laser and Paint Roller can be used, 'Tales won't matter w/ stadium lock: It autolossed to 'Plume and inability to Switch out, unless Dragonite-EX w/ Bust In is in the MRay deck, but since Bust In 'Nite is rarely seen in MRay decks...