|
Latios-EX
(Plasma Freeze)
Latios-EX
is a card of disappointments, really. Disappointment
that he doesn’t have some kind of combo with his fellow
eon Pokémon Latias (even a
goofy one would do!), but more importantly
disappointment that you could pull an EX card of a
pretty awesome Pokémon, and yet not be able to do
anything with him in a competitive deck.
There’s nothing wrong with Latios-EX’s
basic stats. 170 HP is nice (although you wouldn’t
expect lower from an EX) and the Dragon Typing is solid:
Latios will rarely be hit
for Weakness (though there are still a few
Rayquaza-EX decks around),
and that goes both ways in any case. The retreat cost of
two is a bit of a pain, but we have ways around that
like Float Stone and Switch.
There’s no Ability here (a disappointment in itself, I
guess), but there are two attacks. The first, Mach
Flight costs one Psychic and one Colourless, it does
40 damage and prevents the
defending Pokémon from retreating on the next turn.
Obviously the damage output is sub-par to say the least,
but the retreat lock can be useful disruption when
combined with Catcher: particularly if the opponent is
relying exclusively on Float Stone or
Darkrai-EX for retreat
purposes. I suppose it’s a reasonable attack to have
until you are ready for something better . . . and it’s
here that Latios-EX provides
the biggest disappointment of all.
You see, Luster Purge
could have
been great. It does the magic 150 damage, which is
enough to OHKO an EX in most circumstances when combined
with Hypnotoxic Laser and
Virbank City Gym.
Unfortunately the downsides to this attack practically
make it unusable. It costs one Water,
one Psychic, and one Colourless to use. That’s not easy
to set up at all, and because the attack discards all
the Energy, you will have to manage it repeatedly. You
could use Blastoise for a
couple of Water and attach the Psychic manually, but if
you are going to do that . . . why not just run Black
Kyurem-EX BCR, whose Black
Ballista attack only costs one more Energy and does 200
damage: enough to KO anything without the need for Laser
shenanigans.
So yeah . . . basically a nerfed
Black Kyurem . . .
disappointing.
Rating
Modified: 2 (did I mention that this card was a
disappointment?)
Limited: 4.25 (like most EX’s, it’s pretty stellar here.
Hard to KO, and you can just keep using Mach Flight)
|
