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Welcome to the third and final week of our Top 10 Cards Of 2014
Countdown! As we skipped both Christmas and the day
before (obvious reasons are obvious). The lists were
collected and averaged out from the CotD crew to create
the rankings for the master list. As with our Top 10
lists for individual sets, reprints are excluded:
without this rule cards like Double Colorless Energy
place (if not place high) most years. For my own list,
my main guideline was card impact. I evaluated each
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 in 2014).
Our third place finisher and first card reviewed this week is
Yveltal-EX (XY 79/146, 144/146; XY Promos
XY08)! You can read the original review of the card
here
from last February when the set was still quite new. So
what has changed since then? Three more sets, a format
change (NXD-On to BCR-On) and a new format for Organized
Play being added (Expanded, giving you a BW-On format).
Of course, this was shortly after I ended up taking a
vacation from reviewing (that was supposed to have been
permanent), so I didn’t actually review the card myself.
I’ll remedy that by running through it quick (by my
standards) before getting to what its about now.
In short Yveltal-EX had the best typing possible at the time
and still a good Type (especially in Expanded where it
retains its direct Type support; Weakness isn’t overly
common and Resistance started showing up via Fairy Type
Pokémon, but usually aren’t a factor. Being a Basic is
still the best of course, Pyroar (XY:
Flashfire 20/106) and its Intimidating Mane being
the only real hiccup there. Being a Pokémon-EX is
mostly negatives in terms of actual cards (stuff that
counters it or fails to support it and of course, being
worth two Prizes) but this status is why everything else
about the card was allowed to be so great. It has a
solid 170 HP (a small but significant difference from
the current printed max of 180 seen on Basic
Pokémon-EX); it usually will last for two attacks but it
can and will be OHKOed by several decks if they can get
their full set-up going. Lightning Weakness isn’t good
but outside of a few cards it also isn’t bad, even with
Dedenne (XY: Furious Fists 34/111) while
Fighting Resistance has become more useful thanks to
XY: Furious Fists giving Fighting-Types such a huge
boost when they already were a top Type. The Retreat
Cost of two is mediocre but most decks pack something to
aid in retreating and Darkrai-EX is a natural
partner for another Darkness-Type (allowing Dark Cloak
to zero out the Retreat Cost).
The attacks built upon that great foundation, and unlike its
spiritual predecessor/actual rival Mewtwo-EX both
are used regularly by Yveltal-EX in competitive
play. Evil Ball really is a slightly more expensive but
better X-Ball, doing 20+20 per Energy attached to both
Active Pokémon. 20 more doesn’t seem like much but due
to several other cards that can be comboed with it, it
ended up being enough for some important OHKOs (let
alone 2HKOs). Y Cyclone was dismissed by some at first,
much like how Psydrive is rarely used by a Mewtwo-EX,
however actual results verified what some other players
already had realized; you could use it to still set-up
for a 2HKO (or take a OHKO against the smaller half of
the format) while moving an Energy off of Yveltal-EX.
What seems like a drawback ends up merely being a
feature: it makes the most obvious method of countering
it - using something that also hits harder based on
Energy attached like Mewtwo-EX or the
aforementioned Dedenne - less effective by 20 or
40 points of damage (40 or 80 if Weakness is involved)
and most often used to save attached Special Energy
cards by moving them to your next attacker.
It definitely was weakened by both the loss of support it once had
(at least in Standard) plus seriously, that Dedenne
seems made just to be a counter for Yveltal-EX
that doubles as a decent opening Pokémon. So how does
this translate to this “impact” concept which I seem to
be fixated upon?
Breadth: Not universal but widely played. If a deck can reasonably
accommodate at least a few copies of basic Darkness
Energy or a full four copies of Rainbow Energy,
said deck could run Yveltal-EX (earlier in the
year or in Expanded, Blend Energy GRPD and
Prism Energy also count) and possibly should. There
are now several decks that don’t run it, but the number
that can or do is still staggering, so the card received
high marks here. Most of what topped it were - of
course - Trainers of a most generic sort that are
usually run as at least a single (and some in multiples)
for nearly all competitive decks. It will often take a
backseat to whatever is new (or newly empowered) by
recent releases, but a lot of us keep coming back to it.
Depth: Yveltal-EX was not the most influential card in terms of
depth, that is how significantly it influenced the game,
but it is significantly influential and easily in the
top 10 of this specific category. Actually, if
Mewtwo-EX didn’t exist, Yveltal-EX might have
been more significant but similar to how Tool
Scrapper blunted the impact of Startling
Megaphone, players were already prepared to shift to
lower-Energy strategies (at least as much as a given
deck and strategy could) because Mewtwo-EX have
already made that an important skill. Unlike with the
Tool Scrapper/Startling Megaphone situation, the
differences between the two proved more relevant; when
Mewtwo-EX was strong, players could just run
their own copies to counter it. Yveltal-EX could
answer another, but since it wasn’t Weak to its own Type
this didn’t result in a highly probable OHKO (as with
Mewtwo-EX versus Mewtwo-EX). The additional
20 points of damage, as mentioned earlier, also proved
significant as a strategy that just barely worked
against Mewtwo-EX wouldn’t against Yveltal-EX.
For actual Darkness-Type decks, it also provided a pure
powerhouse to compliment what they already had in
attackers… which was pretty much everything but a pure
powerhouse.
On top of all of this, in Expanded (and for basically half the year
in Standard) Yveltal-EX had access to Dark
Patch. Prepping a T2 Yveltal-EX wasn’t as
easy as Mewtwo-EX (which just needed a Double
Colorless Energy) but Yveltal-EX could use
Dark Patch, which coupled with its already extra 20
points of base damage meant for your effort you were
hitting much harder; early game hits by Evil Ball or Y
Cyclone were a thing, the latter usually moving a
Double Colorless Energy to your next Yveltal-EX,
so that without significant countermeasures, your
opponent was getting counterattacked the next turn.
Again, while Yveltal-EX couldn’t secure the best
deck in format for the entire format (possibly never
quite being the true best), but (and this overlaps with
Breadth) Yveltal-EX also receives some of the
credit for players giving Stage 1 cards another look.
I’ll be honest, I thought Raichu (XY
43/146) was high quality filler when I first saw it… but
thanks to exploiting Weakness on Yveltal-EX (and
later getting through Intimidating Mane for a Circle
Circuit OHKO with a Muscle Band or Hypnotoxic
Laser and full Bench), it proved I had been wrong to
assume Stage 1 Pokémon all but gone as serious
attackers. Pyroar and its Intimidating Mane are
more responsible, but still, in an unexpected way
Yveltal-EX helped and that in turn deepens its
impact on the metagame.
Time: Yveltal-EX was released in XY, so that at worst it
could tie with anything else that made the list (barring
some promo I may be forgetting). As this is a list for
all of 2014 and not just how 2014 finished, plus the
fact that the earlier you go back, the better this card
ends up performing thanks to Dark Patch and the
lack of Intimidating Mane as well as less competition
for being an attacker (especially relative to this
list). Indeed this was the area where on my sublist, it
was part of a threeway tie for first place. The next
highest rated card on my own list only scored 1.5 points
higher. To avoid potential confusion, I did the kind of
scoring where 10th place was worth a single point,
increasing by one point per place until a 1st place
finish was worth 10 while ties awarded the mean value of
the slots occupied e.g. a three way tie for first
through third meant 9 points apiece for the cards
involved. With three categories the best anything could
do was 30 and nothing actually topped all three lists…
as opposed to our usual card scores out of five at the
bottom of the review.
Ratings
Standard: 4.25/5 - Not a
general use card but relatively widespread; it often
shows up as a main attacker or secondary attacker in
enough decks that it outranks some cards that I consider
one-per-deck staples. Unlike some other popular
attackers it also doesn’t own most of that strength to
other supporting cards, save Double Colorless Energy
and perhaps the usual damage boosting tricks.
Expanded: 4.5/5 - As above,
only it regains Dark Patch which is huge. It
would rank even higher but here, we have more Lightning
Type decks owing to Eelektrik (BW: Noble
Victories 40/101) also “returning” (when compared
with Standard).
Limited: 5/5 - Either you run this and 39 non-Basic Pokémon cards or you
work this into whatever else you do pull; in Limited
three to five basic Darkness Energy cards aren’t
too much to ask for this powerful of a Pokémon-EX.
Facing Darkness Resistance could be an issue if you
face a mono-Fairy-Type deck but with the raw damage
output, you still have a good shot at securing the win
and while your Lightning Weakness could be exploited, it
requires your opponent got lucky with Rare or better
cards.
Summary: Yveltal-EX is a scary card and for more than the obvious.
Not only is it a strong attacker with a scaleable
attack, but it is at least unsettling that “a better
Mewtwo-EX” (or at least something just as good)
seems less dominant relative to Mewtwo-EX in a
similar place in its lifespan. That entirely has to do
with the rest of the metagame: Mewtwo-EX didn’t
have a previous generation’s worth of Pokémon-EX to
compete with straight out of the box. I ranked
Yveltal-EX as my number two pick for 2014. It was
beaten by both my number one pick and tomorrow’s CotD…
and while I don’t completely agree I certainly
understand why tomorrow’s pick managed such a feat.
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