Name:
Stephen’s Advice
Set:
Hidden Legends
Card#:
Rarity:
Type:
Trainer
Sub-type:
Supporter
Effect
Text:
You can play only one Supporter card each turn. When you play
this card, put it next to your Active Pokémon. When your turn
ends, discard this card.
Draw a
number of cards up to the number of your opponent’s Pokémon in
play.
If you have
more than 7 cards (including this one) in your hand, you can’t
play this card.
Attributes:
As a Supporter, this card faces steep competition in Modified:
nearly ever power Trainer is a Supporter, so you need to pick
and choose them carefully so as not to slow yourself down. In
Unlimited, few Supporters are played, and that may help this
card greatly…
Abilities:
*Reads card*…That’s some good advice. XD I wonder how
many reviews will have this kind of joke? Too many, even if
it’s just mine. Stephen let’s you grab upwards of six cards, so
long as your hand (including Stephen’s Advice) has 7 cards or
less. The only reason this will be a problem is… this card is
that good. Early game, you can probably get an easy 2-4 cards
from Stephen-letting it outshine TV Reporter which has a nasty
discard to get three, or Professor Oak’s Research, which is a
shuffle-and-draw for five. This card basically makes it easy to
balance the field-if your opponent has a full bench, you get six
cards. Wow. That could mean a hand of up to twelve cards.
That’s one fifth of your total deck before accounting for
prizes. Also note that it’s “draw up to”. If you have two
Steven in hand, you can control you hand size to use both. Less
cards than they would give you individually, but more than just
using one for full effect would give.
Uses/Combinations:
This will likely be the new drawing standard for Modified. We
don’t have any real “straight” draw cards for the game right
now: all of them require shuffling, discarding, or some other
restrictive effect. Stephen’s restrictions are marginal. If
you already have seven cards in hand and still don’t have what
you need, then it’s either horrid luck or a bad deck. As for
the Pokémon count, your opponent is usually doing their best to
fill their bench, and so many people running Dunsparce, they are
apt to have four Pokémon by the end of their first turn.
What might not
occur to people is, maybe try some of these in Unlimited. What
do most Sneasel (and the less seen but still played Wigglytuff)
try to do? Fill their bench. What do most decks that rely on
Mindgames for support need to do?
Fill their bench. Very few decks focus on winning with just two
or three guys in play. Since most decks run so few Supporters,
they might consider adding this: it could be an Oak, minus one
draw and the discard.
Ratings
Unlimited:
3.5/5-Its still a supporter, so you can’t Steven multiple times
in a turn like you can Oak, but you could Oak, play a card, then
use Stephen. Thirteen cards in hand is
pretty snazzy for Unlimited.
Modified/2-on-2:
4.5/5-And that might be low. This card is about as good as it
gets. I am hard pressed to find a way to make it any better
without breaking it.
TMP:
5/5-A reason to mention this format again! Here, you have twice
the chance of scoring big.
Limited:
5/5-I can vouch for this-saw quite a few at our pre-release,
even with just 23 participants. People tend to fill their bench
pretty quick here: you have Pokémon and Energy, but not
Trainers. Keep in mind, draw power is so scarce here that
its pretty rare for it not to be
good.
Summary
I can see this
somehow not working, in a deck that manages to maintain a huge
hand, or if it makes Gardevoir ex’s Feedback to lethal.
Otherwise, it’s probably going to become the preferred draw card
for Modified. Try it for Unlimited as well.
