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Manaphy UL
Today’s Pokémon has quite a bit in common with
Yesterday’s. Like Jirachi, it is a Legendary, starred in
its own movie (Pokémon Ranger and the Temple of the
Sea), and sometimes gets made into interesting cards
(well, POP 9 Manaphy was sort of interesting, even if it
never got played).
Also like Jirachi, Manaphy is a low-HP non evolving
Basic with a terrible Weakness. At least it has free
Retreat though. Another similarity is that it is clearly
designed to be a ‘tech’ Pokémon.
We can pretty much ignore Manaphy’s Wave Splash attack
(an ineffective vanilla 20 for [W] effort), and
concentrate instead on Deep Sea Swirl. For one Energy of
any colour, this lets you shuffle your hand into your
deck and draw five cards.
Doesn’t sound too bad does it? Reasonable hand refresh
for a fairly low cost that can help you out against hand
disruption decks and bad draws. The only thing is . . .
we already have a Pokémon that does the job much better:
Chatot MD.
Chatot MD is another 60 HP Basic with a zero Retreat
cost and a hand refresh attack. However, that attack
costs no Energy to use and it is backed up by Chatter,
which for [C][C] can do a very nice job of locking your
opponent’s Pokémon active for a turn (especially useful
against Spiritomb). What’s more, it’s a Common, unlike
Manaphy which is a Holo Rare.
It looks like the people who design the cards looked at
Chatot and decided it was so broken that they would
replace it with something that was slightly more
rubbish, and they would give that card an inflated
rarity. All the while MD is still legal, there’s
absolutely no reason for anyone to play Manaphy UL. Even
if Chatot is rotated out of the format, Supporters like
Copycat and Professor Oak’s New Theory will do a better
job than Manaphy without having to use an attack (or an
Energy drop). It’s possible it might get teched into
decks next format if nothing better comes along, but
let’s just hope that it does.
Rating
Modified: 1.5 (Every time someone puts this in a deck,
somewhere a baby Chatot dies faints)
Limited: 3.25 (no better alternative here, where it can
do a very useful job)
Combos with . . .
A terrible hand
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