Right, so I never used a Weavile and it turns out this game has Sneasel so I decided to catch one as my 6th. Managed to capture one with Adamant nature (yay!) and complete my team that already included a Primarina, Toucannon, Magneton, Chandelure, and Exeggutor. I proceeded to look up how to evolve Sneasel when I discovered that.
1. Sneasel needs a Razor Claw to evolve
2. Razor claw is only found on Jangmo-o and its evolutions
3. Jangmo-o and Hakamo-o only have it 5% of the time
4. Kommo-o has it 50% of the time (Yay, coin flips!)
5. Jangmo-o only occurs 5% of the time
So with a complete and utter lack of preparation I ran around some grass for a half hour looking for a Jangmo-o, scouted it with Exeggutor's frisk, no Razor claw, and it occurred to me that I would have to rummage through 400 Pokemon on average to get the item I needed. Up until now, I had completely ignored SOS battles, but that 50/50 on the Kommo-o was looking very tempting, so I decided to try one. Found a second Jangmo-o after many minutes, used adrenaline orb and burned it. Dunno why I burned it, seemed like a reasonable way to get a status affect and chip damage and waited for an SOS to happen. No SOS, turned out that status affects decrease the rate of SOS's. Also turns out that honey also has no impact on SOS's, or anything. Now I have 50 useless honeys, but that's just a minor waste of money.
Back to the task at hand. I did a bit of research on SOS battles and found a third Jangmo-o, by which point I had thoroughly memorized the cries of Skarmory, Machoke, Murkrow, Lycanroc, and Boldore. Scouted it, no item, noticed that it was spamming Iron Defense so I thought a skill-link-Toucannon-Bullet-Seed would offer a happy amount of damage to encourage some more frequent SOS. I was met with a message of "Bulletproof!" and realized that I hadn't bothered to look up Jangmo-o's ability. So I tried an Energy Ball. Same message, 0 damage, looked up the ability in case Jangmo-o was also immune to paralysis or something (it isn't). Decided to resort to Magneton's Charge Beam which did a reasonable job.
A few turns later I was happily met with the arrival of a second Jangmo-o and nuked the first one. Then a Hakamo-o arrived and I nuked the second Jangmo-o. I kept scouting with Exeggutor, ignoring the threat of a stat-boosted dragon claw, but I was getting concerned by how often the dragons loved to use work-out and I wasn't fond of the idea of reaching the point of one hit KO's. Then I observed that the dragons only ever had either a normal move (headbutt) or a dragon move (dragon claw), and never both. With a fairy and ghost type this quickly became a non-issue. I was juggling 4 Pokemon, using Exeggutor as a scout, Magneton to deal chip damage, Chandelure to eat headbutts and Primarina to sponge dragon-attacks. Maybe Sneasel could have none better chip damage with false swipe, but it was currently in Pokepelago doing EV training so I wasn't going to bother it.
So a second Hakamo-o arrived, then a third, and my strategy was working pretty great. Magneton, despite how much the little hodgepodge of metal objects adored me, seemed to be refraining from critical hits as it zapped away. After eons of stalling, the third Hakamo-o finally summoned a big beautiful shiny Kommo-o (not literally palette swapped shiny, the "I'm happy to see this thing" shiny). I called upon my Exeggutor to scout, praying for the 50/50 and was ecstatic to see the little paint stroke indicated an identified item and Razor Claw. Paralyzed it, damaged it, caught it, got my Razor Claw.
SOS battles are awesome.
