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Welcome to our
Top 10 Cards Of 2014 Countdown! The lists have been
collected from the CotD crew and compiled to give us our
list to review. Just like with our Top 10 lists for
individual sets, reprints are excluded: this can seem a
bit unfair as sometimes they are very important cards,
but without this rule cards like Double Colorless
Energy, Professor Juniper (later Professor
Sycamore) and a few others would get reviewed two or
three times a year, always as a part of these lists.
For my own list, my main guideline was card “impact”,
how it affected the game. I evaluated the card
according to breadth of impact (how widespread its
usage/response to its usage was), depth of impact (how
deeply it affected the decks that used it/needed to
counter it) and time of impact (how long did it affect
how we played). Yes, that last category favors older
cards versus newer cards, but the newer ones have the
advantage of being fresh in my mind, plus again we are
considering all of 2014, not just how the year
ended.
First up is
Startling Megaphone, originally reviewed seven
months ago: you can see for yourself what we said about
it
here. I hadn’t returned to actively
reviewing yet so what were/are my thoughts on this card?
I’ve got to echo and expand upon what both baby_mario
and Hez said; this is an incredibly potent card and with
the strength of many Pokémon Tools we have seen,
something to combat them directly might have been
required but at the same time this is overkill. The
short version is that if you can give up one of
something to take out at least one of and possibly more
than one of something your opponent has in play, its to
your benefit. While the exact situation is far more
nuanced, you should rarely fail to get your deck space’s
worth of value out of Startling Megaphone, and
likely can generate significant advantage beyond the
single slot a copy will cost you and the risk that your
opponent would actually fail to run any Items worth
discarding. This card killed off an established (though
not overly common) Tool Drop decks built around
Trubbish (BW: Plasma Storm 65/135), though
with the release of Dimension Valley and
Lysandre’s Trump Card players are trying to bring
the deck back.
So… why is such
a potent, influential card only number 10?
Breadth: Most decks wanted to run at least one
Startling Megaphone but few could afford to run
more than two; extra copies were useful, but not more
useful than the many other Items competing for similar
slot in your deck. There aren’t a lot of cards to rival
it here, but there are still two more categories and of
course, reviewers.
Depth: We already had Tool Scrapper
before this was released, so besides killing Tool Drop
decks the format had already adjusted to overpowered,
Item-based Tool removal. Tool Scrapper had a few
pluses to it in certain decks, since there were times
when being able to discard your own Pokémon Tool was
important, and if players were already scared to commit
too many Pokémon Tools to the field because of Tool
Scrapper, that one difference became significant.
In Expanded it is still significant because
Pokémon Tool F cards can be countered by Tool
Scrapper but not Startling Megaphone, those
running Pokémon Tool F cards also have reason to prefer
Tool Scrapper because Startling Megaphone
forces them to discard any Pokémon Tool F cards they
have in play, instead of just the opposing player’s own
Tools. There is also the nature of the format; as 2HKOs
are the norm and OHKOs are not uncommon, a slot spent
discarding a Pokémon Tool. Garbodor (BW:
Dragons Exalted
54/124; BW: Plasma Freeze 119/116; BW:
Legendary Treasures 68/113) backed decks and their
prominence have also been a major factor in the
importance of Startling Megaphone; the decks that
run multiple Startling Megaphone are almost
always doing so to disable Garbotoxin.
Time: Startling Megaphone debuted in
XY: Flashfire, the second set released this year.
Cards from XY and the promo series are the only
ones with more seniority but still released this year,
however again Tool Scrapper remains a
factor. It didn’t rotate out and leave Startling
Megaphone as the only generic, universal option for
this role in Standard until September 3rd (the same day
that XY: Furious Fists became tournament legal),
cutting into its time to shine.
Ratings
Standard: 4/5 - Rarely will a deck skip this
card completely, though by the same note rarely will a
deck be able to justify running more than one or two
copies (usually just one).
Expanded: 3.75/5 - As in Standard except you may
be running Tool Scrapper instead, cutting down on
the dominance of Startling Megaphone. It will
likely be a metagame specific distinction based on both
what you and everyone else is running; the score could
float up or down a quarter point quite reasonably.
Limited: 2/5 - XY: Flashfire only
contains Protect Cube, though as is often the
case you probably have the room and should run it just
in case.
Summary: Startling Megaphone is nearly
an automatic one of in every Standard deck deck, and the
few cases where it can be skipped are balanced out by
those that run two (and might run more if they only had
the room). It is only a little less used in Expanded as
certain strategies and Pokémon Tool F cards make the
selectivity of Tool Scrapper the better choice.
Both of these Pokémon Tools might be even more valuable
except that the format is so fast that it is often as
(if not more) effective to put the deck space towards
KOing whatever has a problematic Pokémon Tool and that
players long ago learned to both hold onto a Pokémon
Tool until it could be played for immediate benefit or
else would have been discarded anyway (such as for a
Professor Juniper).
For my own
list, Startling Megaphone secured the fourth
place spot owing to a single copy of it showing up in
most decklists I would take seriously since Tool
Scrapper rotated out, and even then almost as many
as soon as it was released and legal for competitive
play. We would play the game much differently without
it or anything similar to it, at least in Standard.
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