aroramage |
If you had told me that there were
three cards that all functionally did the same thing in
Pokemon TCG, I'd believe you. Let's be honest, there are
a lot of ways to make Pokemon have various similarities
- there's flavor texts with a lot of Pokemon that
 can
give them a certain dynamic that, while niche in the
competitive scene, lends a lot to fun casual duels. For
instance, what deck could feasibly run 3 Types of
Pokemon with 3 main attackers doing the same 3 things?
Maybe whatever monstrosity was meant to come from the
creation of Simisage, Simisear, and Simipour!
Alright, let's get the common parts
out of the way...okay, actually, they all have a LOT in
common. They're all Stage 1s, they have the same Retreat
Cost, they don't have any Resistance, and they all have
90 HP. Also, all their attacks are Colorless, meaning
that they can be technically run in any deck that needs
them...which is weird, cause they all have effects that
sorta relate to other Types.
Let's start with their first
attack: (Theme) Fling! In the case of Simisage, it's
Fire Fling...where he...grabs fire with his bare hands
and flings it...even though he's clearly weak to it. But
that's okay, Simisear's busy with Water Fling...which
he's weak to...and Simipour has Green Fling which...he's
weak to Grass. What's up with that? They're all just
flinging around their Weaknesses?
 That's...really
odd. Granted, they each get you 3 Energy cards of their
Weakness Type back into your hand, but...why would you
run them in the deck you're supposed to? Like, why run
Simisage in a Fire deck or Simipour in a Grass deck?
And then there's Hand Fling, the
other commonality between the three of them. It's the
exact same thing for each one: a 2-cost hit that does 10
damage for every card in your hand. So now we've got a
weird strategy of getting Energy into your hand...but
keeping a hold of it because you want to power up the
Simi's attack.
Fun fact: you need 18 cards in hand
to OHKO a Pokemon-EX, and 25 cards in hand will net you
any Pokemon you want!
Another fun fact: That's about a
third of your deck!
...WHY
Rating
Standard: 1/5 (there's no reason to
run them, even as alternate attackers in surprise builds
of their Weakness Types)
Expanded: 1/5 (sure, you could
surprise your opponent's Vespiquen deck by pulling out a
Simisear and decimating them with only 5 cards in hand,
and that's pretty novel and about the only way to really
run any of these guys)
Limited: 2.5/5 (but the fact is
you're devoting deck space at that point to a tech
that's...not even really a good tech card to begin with;
the Eeveelutions from Ancient Origins are more useful to
you at that point)
Arora Notealus: The flavoring of
the trio of monkeys being based on the classic, "See No
Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil," trio of monkeys is
really neat, and having them play off of each other with
their flavorings and relationships in-game is neat. But
again, I come back to my original point that these are
casual ideas, not competitive ones. The surprise of
hitting an opponent's weakness with a tech card like
this isn't really worth it considering how much you need
to put into it first just to make it work - and again,
you're better off using the Eeveelutions to tech with
than any of these monkeys.
That being said, I still think
Simisage is the coolest.
Weekend Thought: So what cards this
week have given you a new hope in deck ideas? Do you
feel like the Fire deck is making a comeback with these
types of cards, or do they still have a ways to go?
Could this stuff combined with that in Flashfire make
the Fire deck a formidable force? Or maybe I'm just
spouting out hypothetical questions that won't really
matter because you're still focused on how bad the Simis
are. Don't worry, I don't think they're that great
either.
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Otaku |
We
finish off our Fire Week with a triple review… that
includes two non-Fire-Types. What? Why?
We’ve got three cards that are almost identical except
for miscellaneous Energy symbols so it seemed prudent to
cover them all together as that just requires touching
upon the slight differences. So today we look at
Simisage (XY: BREAKthrough 6/162),
Simisear (XY: BREAKthrough 24/162) and
Simipour (XY: BREAKthrough 42/162)!
We’ll
focus on what they have in common first: all are Stage 1
Pokémon, so it takes a turn or use of a Supporter to get
them into play and always at least two cards. Each
has 90 HP which makes them easy KOs the majority of the
time, though they might survive a hit against an
incomplete setup or a deck that is really focused on
attack effects over damage (Seismitoad-EX).
None of them have Resistance (like I keep saying, it is
the norm) and a Retreat Cost of [C] which is easy both
to pay and to recover from having paid. None of
these three have an Ancient Trait or Ability but
all three have two attacks, the first priced at [C] and
the second at [CC]. The first attack is nearly identical
but there are some small, substantial differences so
we’ll cover the second - Hand Fling - which does 10
damage times the number of cards in your hand. On
its own, this is underwhelming, but we’ll need to come
back to it after we cover the different Types involved.
Even in isolation, “underwhelming” should not be
mistaken for useless: a Double Colorless Energy
covers the entire cost and as long as your hand doesn’t
get too small, you can have a decent return. I’d
settle for 60+ damage, so a hand of six or more cards,
which may not be easy to retain by the end of your turn,
but it is closer to that than it is to being difficult.
So how
about we get to specifics? Simisage is a
Grass-Type; that means about 40% of Water-Types will
take double damage from it via Weakness in Expanded and
around 70% in Standard! While Water isn’t the top
Type right now, Grass Weak examples still show up often
enough in competitive play, including in the top cut.
Actual Grass-Type support isn’t bad either; you’ve got
Forest of Giant Plants to try for a T2 (the first
turn of the player going second) Hand Fling if you’d
like, plus a few other tricks to consider like
Ariados (XY: Ancient Origins 6/98).
There are a few anti-Grass-Type cards but they aren’t
used much (if at all) in successful competitive play,
meaning they are more a risk if someone is gearing up
for a different Grass-Type deck or as a “random”
encounter in the early rounds. Grass-Type
Resistance isn’t a thing at all unless you’re playing in
Unlimited (in which case you’ve got bigger problems). Simisage
is Fire Weak which is not a good thing right now;
normally 90 HP would imply overkill for Weakness but
as I mentioned yesterday Entei (XY: Ancient
Origins 15/98) and Charizard-EX (XY:
Flashfire 12/106) now have their own deck and it did
great during the recent City Championships. While
the big attacks on either card would indeed score a OHKO
without Weakness, the issue is that the smaller attacks
can now do the deed. For Charizard-EX,
using Wing Attack just means a smaller investment but
for Entei it means a single Muscle Band
allows a “Flame Screen” OHKO that will reduce the damage
Entei takes the next turn plus only
requires two Energy to use.
Simisear
is a Fire-Type so what we’ve been saying most of the
week applies; a scourge for most Grass- or Metal-Types
because nearly all of them are Fire Weak, some decent
support but not as much as many other Types and no
dealing with Resistance for weird “anti-Type” cards.
Water Weakness could be an issue as right now there is
probably an added incentive to work it into decks, plus
even if it wasn’t, the Water-Type is appropriately
enough fairly easy to splash into off-Type decks.
Something like Seismitoad-EX only needs a
Double Colorless Energy to hit with the dreaded
“Quaking Punch” and it just needs a Muscle Band
for the OHKO… which is pretty good for it and bad for
Simisear considering Quaking Punch is mostly about
locking down Items, not doing damage. Another
slight oddity is Flareon (XY: Ancient Origins
13/98) which allows any Stage 1 Pokémon to count as a
Fire-Type and thus could be run so that any member of
our monkey trio could use Fire-Type support such as
Blacksmith and hit Fire Weakness. The good
news for Simisear is that makes its support more
relevant to say an all Simi trio deck but the bad
news is that also means it is expendable as nearly
everything about it? Now the others can cover.
Simipour
is a Water-Type and that means access to some great
support… except I am uncertain as to how well it would
fit in a non-Water-Type deck. That isn’t an issue
of Simipour is on Type of course; then it is
pretty easy to enjoy Archie’s Ace in the Hole so
that (again) you can manage a T2 Hand Fling (hopefully
you can increase that hand size) and Dive Ball.
I would not run Archie’s Ace in the Hole just for
that, though - if something else calls for it, congrats
it also works on Simipour. Hitting Water
Weakness is once again a good thing; we’ve got a new,
hot Fire deck to cool down and you’ll also get some
Fighting-Types with Water Weakness rolling in from time
to time. Water Resistance is somewhat common on
older Grass-Types and there are a few anti-Water-Type
cards, though the latter is unlikely to be a major issue
except against unusual decks encountered in early
rounds. It is possible for the other two Simi-trio
cards to fake being Water-Types thanks to Vaporeon
(XY: Ancient Origins 22/98), but unlike the
Fire-Type the best bits of Water-Type support target
cards in the deck or discard pile, so it isn’t as much
of a benefit.
All
three cards have an attack that has yet to be covered,
and I didn’t save it for last because it is mind
blowing, but because it is a bit odd because each is
nearly identical except for part of the attack’s name
and an Energy symbol in the attack’s effect text (not
its cost to use). In all cases said attack adds
three Energy from the discard pile to the hand, but
Simisage uses “Fire Fling” for [R] Energy,
Simisear uses “Water Fling” for [W] Energy, while
Simipour uses “Green Fling” for [G] Energy.
You read that correctly; all three members of the
Simi-trio snag the Energy that matches the Type of
another member of the group! As none of
them need their own Energy Type this only benefits these
particular versions as a means of building up the hand…
but as they are most likely about to get OHKO, burning
an Energy, Energy attachment and attack for a
Type-specific Energy Retrieval-times-one-and-a-half
isn’t too appealing. It makes me wonder if these
cards were intended to be used as off-Type attackers in
those decks, with the attack a bit like the coins in
some Super Mario games; while sometimes useful
for what they give you, mostly they exist to fill space
and give you a heads up where you are to go.
The
Pansage (XY: BREAKthrough 5/162), Pansear
(XY: BREAKthrough 23/162) and Panpour (XY:
BREAKthrough 42/162) of this set follow a pattern
similar to their Evolutions: all are Basic Pokémon with
60 HP and otherwise the same attributes as their Evolved
forms and all three have the same attack (Fury Swipes)
for [C]. It isn’t overly impressive as it just
allows you to flip three coins and do 10 damage per
“heads” but apart from really needing to focus on setup
more than damage, it isn’t bad. As this is a
triple review I shall refrain from covering past
Pansage, Simisage, Pansear,
Simisear, Panpour and/or Simipour.
For the lower stages, I would favor versions with more
HP when possible. For the Simi-trio itself,
while some have interesting tricks I am thinking the
idea for these three might be to use them all together.
Should you build a deck around them? Only if you
enjoy gimmicks or are a bit desperate… but the thing is
a deck similar to what I am about to suggest used to be
a somewhat common sight for budget players, at least on
the PTCGO. Two months ago we
covered
Metagross (XY: Ancient Origins 50/98); I
don’t see it much because the deck was built around its
“Machine Gun Stomp” attack which also costs [CC] and did
10 damage per card in that player’s hand but also
20 points of base damage (to 20, plus 10 per card in
hand). Judge made it likely your opponent could
shrink your hand back down to four cards, so the deck
hasn’t been showing up as much (at least when I play) as
at least a single Judge is common to most
Standard decks.
The new
Simi-trio does 20 less damage, but a Stage 1 is
much easier to manage than a Stage 2. Metagross
hit Metal Weakness, and while that is handy against
Fairy-Types and some Water-Types, only a fraction of
that fraction of Water-Types sees consistent competitive
play. My thought is to use the Simi-trio
and exploit Type-matching in order to get by with a much
smaller hand for big damage… as well as medium damage
because hey, we are only giving up Stage 1 Pokémon worth
a single Prize and that aren’t too difficult to power-up
again. The main question in my mind is whether to
work in the aforementioned Flareon and
Vaporeon, and/or set-mate Jolteon (XY:
Ancient Origins 26/98). Jolteon alone allows
the Simi-trio to hit a fourth Weakness. Flareon
seems to make Simisear unnecessary while making
basic Fire Energy a useful part of the deck.
That matters not only for the well established trick of
using Blacksmith to cover the [CC] cost of Hand
Fling in one shot, but of using Scorched Earth
and/or Fiery Torch for additional draw power.
Throw in the other usual basic Energy tricks and while
you won’t have a good, competitive deck, you might end
up with a fun deck, one that might especially be good
for newer players if you make discards all about tossing
and reclaiming Fire Energy cards (instead of
needing to know which Supporter or Pokémon or whatever
else to toss).
So not
a major addition to Expanded or Standard play, but maybe
in the latter you can find a tiny use for these three.
In Limited no worries; these three are great either
together or separately. You aren’t likely to have
a lot of draw power here but you are likely to have time
to build and a lot of cards you can’t play down rapidly,
plus lower HP scores all around. All together,
that allows Hand Fling to be far more effective. I
would only skip Simisage, Simisear or
Simipour if I pulled a good enough basic Pokémon-EX
to run a +39 deck.
Ratings
Standard:
Simisage - 1.9/5, Simisear - 1.8/5,
Simipour - 1.8/5
Expanded:
Simisage - 1.45/5, Simisear - 1.3/5,
Simipour - 1.3/5
Limited:
All Three - 4/5
Summary:
Simisage, Simisear and Simipour
aren’t overly complex on their own but they might be
good material for “My first advanced deck”. Hand
Fling has some small potential as does the
Type-matching… but not enough to take to a tournament.
On the brightside, now the review team has had some
practice reviewing three different Pokémon following a
common template but distinct only because of names and
Energy symbols. Why does that matter? I’d
like to avoid what happened with the XY: Ancient
Origins Eeveelutions in the future. ;)
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