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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.
The second card we are covering (making it our 9th place finisher)
is Bronzong (XY: Phantom Forces 61/1149, XY
Promos XY21), which we recently reviewed
here.
So what has changed? Not much, really; as far as I can
tell Bronzong is performing more or less as
expected; in video game terms it is like a reskinned,
slightly tweaked version of
Eelektrik
(BW: Noble Victories 40/101), so its quite
familiar to players that were around for Eelektrik
decks. So far it hasn’t really branched out like
Eelektrik did, having so many variants, and even if
it does I don’t really expect the decks to differ enough
in how they are played and what they do to really count
as full, separate archetypes… though eventually it
might.
Breadth:
It affects… a little over one deck. Metal Weakness is
out there and it finally matters but the counter
to Metal is Fire, which was already tempting because of
the need to take on the Fire Weak Genesect-EX and
Virizion-EX. Plus most decks just cope with
Weakness, accepting a bad match-up and just trying to
work around it unless said Weakness is quite common in
the metagame. I’m thinking people are not
running Fire-Types just to deal with Bronzong
decks, but I could be wrong. So there isn’t much breath
to its impact.
Depth:
It grants a new deck… that plays very similarly to an
old deck and doesn’t even feel all that different from
many current decks. Its a pretty standard Beatdown
deck, just one backed by Energy acceleration instead of
(for example) Ability denial. It is a vital part of
Metal-Type decks, but even there its got this one role
it does well and its not good for anything else, and
that deck works by taking a bunch of cards that would
otherwise be “near misses”, and turns them into “hits”.
Time:
XY: Phantom Forces became legal for Organized
Play November 26th, 21 days after it was officially
released in the United States of America. So as of
writing this, it hasn’t even been tournament legal
(outside of Pre-Releases) for an entire month. It has
only been generally available a little over one month.
In short… its a newb.
Ratings
Standard:
3.75/5 - Deck specific; for more details see my previous
review. I was tempted to score it “in general” or as a
composite score (which would be much lower) to help
emphasize it’s got its own niche but doesn’t belong
anywhere else… but instead of making things more clear,
I suspect it would just make them more confusing.
Expanded:
4/5 - As above; I will mention that Heavy Ball
seems like it should really help Metal-Type decks built
around Bronzong, which is why I scored it higher
(again) for its own specific deck.
Limited:
4.25/5 - Again, please refer to the previous review;
I’ll just mention that this is not as deck specific.
Summary:
Bronzong is a very good card in its own deck, but
its too clunky to try to work it in for a little
acceleration elsewhere. As you probably deduced by now…
this did not make my own list. Maybe it should have,
but not only is it not directly affecting most decks, it
isn’t causing them to change things up (thus affecting
them indirectly). It didn’t give us a fresh new deck,
but brought back something we had not too long ago, that
even with the Energy acceleration is yet another
beatdown deck. Lastly, it hasn’t even been legal for
Organized Play for a full month. Another year, its
accomplishments would easily justify including it but
this year? I just feel like we had other cards that
deserved to make the list even more. The number 10 pick
(Startling Megaphone) should have come in above
this… or at least I think it should have.
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