aroramage |
Alongside the mighty Kabutops, we
find the greater power in the world, the one that we
consult to in our most dire and pressing needs, the one
that we turn to and whose values we uphold to this day.
For it is by the spiraling helix that we live, and it is
the swirling descension into madness that we...wait, his
attack is vanilla?
...anywho, here's Omastar.
Omastar has a noticeably lower HP
score than Kabutops at only 120 HP, and being the
Evolution of a Restored Pokemon doesn't make him any
easier to get out. Not that he'd even be worth getting
out in the first place with an attack
like...Spinning...Attack...it's 2-for-60 vanilla, it's
not gonna be what you're using in the long run with
Omastar.
But there are two big reasons to
use Omastar, and that's why he's on the list today. You
see that Ability of his? Restoring Beam? Well, have you
ever wondered how great Restored Pokemon could be if you
were able to play them like regular Pokemon? Now you've
got something that can do that! With the Beam, Omastar
can grab out any Restored Pokemon from your deck and put
it onto your Bench for free! That's a lot less to worry
about, now that you can grab things with ease.
Unfortunately, this doesn't
ultimately help the Restored deck. Sure, it makes it far
more consistent, but you have to get Omastar into play
first, and that's not easy to do with the deck because
Omastar himself comes from a Restored Pokemon. Course
you could just use Archie's on him, and that would
probably solve the whole problem, but then you've got to
get Omastar into the discard somehow-BATTLE COMPRESSOR,
YOU'RE THE BEST ITEM FOR EVERYTHING!!
So it's possible a Restored deck
could work out, but it's far from Omastar's most
dangerous usage...
Rating
Standard: 2.5/5 (for Restored
decks, this is as good as it gets...not that I know of
anyone playing a full Restored deck)
Expanded: 2.5/5 (I mean technically
speaking you can't, since the Pokemon have to be played
by Items, and you wouldn't have a Basic to play down for
a Turn 1 scenario)
Limited: 2.5/5 (...man, we had it
good back in the day)
Arora Notealus: I'm just saying, at
least you could play Mysterious Fossil if you needed to.
Sure, it only had 10 HP, but it didn't give your
opponent a Prize and made things really easy for your
Fossil Pokemon! Worst case...you stall out till your
opponent can't do anything to you?
Next Time: And as for that second
reason to try Omastar...
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Otaku |
Omastar
(XY: Fates Collide 18/124) is our second
Evolution of a Restored Pokémon we are looking at this
week. It is a Water Type, which is a good Type,
though not the greatest. The main reason is for
the support; it isn’t as nice as what the Fighting Type
enjoys, but you’ll get some nifty tricks including what
may be the most important - Archie’s Ace in the Hole
- to avoid the hassles that normally go with running the
Evolution of a Restored Pokémon. It isn’t the
greatest for hitting Weakness, but that is a matter of
the current competitive metagame: nearly all Fire Types
and a chunk of the Fighting Type are Water Weak, but
they aren’t a significant presence in recent tournament
top cuts. Water Resistance is a common but only on
BW-era Grass Types; I know of nothing with it in the
XY-era. Anti-Water Type effects exist, but mostly
seem to mimic Resistance and haven’t been significant
(or have been but for a totally different effect, like
Parallel City).
As stated,
Omastar Evolves from a Restored Pokémon so it is a
Stage 1. I do wish that - having gone to the
trouble of created this new Stage and mechanic that is
“Restored Pokémon” - the designers had also
distinguished between their Stage 1 forms and those of
regular Stage 1 cards. If they were classified as
“Restored Basic” and “Restored Stage 1” Pokémon, for
example, it would be easier for support to work for both
without also working for regular Stage 1 Pokémon.
So that is why even though being a Stage 1 is normally
adequate (not as good as being a Basic but better than
everything else), it isn’t for Omastar This is
important to remember when looking at the rest of the
card, like its 120 HP. This amount isn’t so low as
to be an easy KO but not high enough to be likely to
survive; it is on the lower end of ambiguous
survivability (…am I the only one that thinks “ambiguous
survivability” makes for a decent band name?). I
have stated more than once final Stages of Evolution (be
they Basic, Stage 1, Stage 2, Restored, or now BREAK)
ought to actually be on even footing with each other,
with the time it takes to hit the field only being
relevant because some effects (like attacks that can
score KOs) are a problem if they hit the field too soon.
That is the direction I want to see the game go, but for
these reviews the focus is on what they can do here and
now. 120 Still isn’t bad for a Stage, until we include
the hassle of being a Restored Pokémon. Now it
definitely feels low.
Coupled with the
HP, the Grass Weakness all but ensures any remotely
serious Grass Type attacker scores a OHKO. Serious
attackers were already were only going to whiff on
taking out Omastar in a single hit if something
went horribly wrong for your opponent and his or her
setup. With 120 HP, now supporting Grass Type
attackers such as Virizion-EX just need a
Fighting Fury Belt attached (or various other buffs)
to score a OHKO. Run into the odd Sceptile-EX
(XY: Ancient Origins 7/98, 84/98) deck? Its
“Unseen Claw” attack won’t need a Special Condition to
trigger its bonus damage, or if the deck also uses M
Sceptile-EX, its “Jagged Saber” will easily score
the KO. I am starting to wonder if I should go
back to flat out criticizing a lack of Resistance;
barring other effects that specifically respond to HP or
Resistance itself, Resistance will only matter if it
alters how you approach the situation. If
Resistance isn’t going to affect how many turns it takes
to score a KO, then it probably isn’t going to affect
how you treat the matchup, is it? So with 120 HP
and only -20 to damage from a specific Type, that means
it probably won’t matter. At the same time, you
get cards like Omastar that need all the help
they can get, even if it would be a rare, slightly
improved matchup. The Retreat Cost of [CC] is
functionally (not mathematically) average, low enough
you probably will be able to afford to pay it (maybe
even recover from having paid it) but high enough it
behooves you to plan ahead to work around it, be that
lowering the cost or bypassing it entirely.
Omastar
has the Ability “Restoration Beam” and the attack - er -
“Spinning Attack”. The former allows the player
running this Omastar to search his or her deck
for a Restored Pokémon and play it to his or her Bench,
once per turn before attacking. This is worded so
that if you have multiple copies, each is “once per
turn”; three Omastar would allow each one a use
of Restoration Beam, for three total uses. This
will sound like it should be a nitpick, but I am
honestly a bit worried by it searching and playing a
Restored Pokémon from your deck to the Bench.
Normally this would be great, but the default way of
playing a Restored Pokémon is supposed to be using the
correct corresponding Item card (such as Helix Fossil
Omanyte for Omanyte) to play it from the
bottom seven cards of your deck to the Bench. So
should a Restored Pokémon already be in hand, it is a
dead target. In the case of Water Types, adding
something to hand is even easier than for Pokémon in
general. I do not believe it is asking too much
for Restoration Beam to have the option of also working
from hand, or perhaps better yet, have it work from the
discard pile. Spinning Attack doesn’t just have an
uncreative name, but the attack only does 60 damage
(nothing else) for [WC]; a filler attack that isn’t
awful but isn’t quite adequate either. Just 10
more damage would have allowed a Muscle Band to
buff it into 2HKO levels against most Basic Pokémon-EX.
Perhaps a bit much for [WC], but 70 for [WCC] is
something we’ve seen before.
Helix Fossil
Omanyte
is one way to get Omanyte into play. It
isn’t what I recommend, but much like the generic way of
getting a Stage 2 into play is to Evolve it from the
Stage 1 form that in turn Evolved from the Basic of that
Evolution line, this is what we do before we consider
better, more useful card effects like Rare Candy
or Wally to speed things along. Helix Fossil
Omanyte just looks at the bottom seven cards of your
deck and allows you to play one (and only one for
some annoying reason) Omanyte you might find
there. Omanyte (XY: Fates Collide 17/124)
is your only option: it is a Water Type Restored Pokémon
with 80 HP, Grass Weakness, no Resistance, Retreat Cost
[CC], and just one attack - “Water Gun” - which does 30
damage for [W]. This is just the name/Type/theme
adjusted version of Kabuto, which came up
yesterday
as we were reviewing Kabutops. Kabuto had
some potential because it could tap the damage buffs of
the Fighting Type; Omanyte is just better than
the usual filler for something to Evolve from, but
overall disappointing. Omastar does have
something Kabutops lacked: a BREAK Evolution! Omastar
BREAK will be covered
tomorrow,
as I am sure you already expected. It will provide
Omastar a small HP boost and a new Ability, but
not a new attack, and this is one of those times when a
better attack was probably what was most needed.
We’ll discuss it in detail tomorrow.
So should you run
Omastar? Probably not as we get to that big
problem with Restored Pokémon; you fill in the slots
you’d normally assign to Pokémon, but they aren’t with
Basics and thus even though you’re not running as many
Trainers or Energy cards as you might like, you aren’t
getting a more reliable open like you would with more
Basics. In fact, you must include some
Basic wholly unrelated to the line in order to have a
legal deck. Whether slogging through Helix
Fossil Omanyte, trying your luck with Twisted
Mountain, or using Archie’s Ace in the Hole
to proceed directly to Omastar, you won’t have
room for the various other Restored Pokémon and their
Stage 1 Evolutions. What you might have room for
is just the Restored Pokémon and one of them
doesn’t Evolve: Aerodactyl (XY: Fates Collide
76/124). Yes, that will be our
Friday review so again, I won’t get into details, other than Aerodactyl
has decent attributes and attacks, so it might be
worthwhile. If Omastar BREAK seems good,
that too might justify trying to squeeze Archie’s Ace
in the Hole, Omanyte, and Omastar BREAK
into a deck but… probably not. Aerodactyl and
Omastar BREAK might belong in the same deck though;
just remember to have something worth acting as your
opening Pokémon! Even for Limited play, Omastar
just isn’t that great; hard to get into play and if you
draw your other Restored Pokémon before then, they
become pure deadweight.
Ratings
Standard:
2/5
Expanded:
2/5
Limited:
2/5
Summary:
Putting a shortcut for Restored Pokémon that does not
require a coin flip and works with any (not just
certain) Restored Pokémon on a Stage 1 card which
Evolves from a Restored Pokémon must have seemed like a
good idea to someone, but I think I just explained why
it is almost self-defeating as you have to dedicate so
much space to getting Omastar out that having
room for other Restored Pokémon (let alone their
Evolutions) is painful. Might have a shot of
Omastar BREAK and/or Aerodactyl prove good
enough, but seems unlikely.
Omastar
itself actually made it into our extended Top 10 list.
Not mine, but someone like it enough that it earned
three voting points. Given how this set turned
out, I actually understand the decision as there were a
lot of cards that looked like they probably wouldn’t
work out but had an outside chance, and that is what
usually ends up in those lower ranks. Three Top 15
lists became one Top 27, so Omastar actually did
pretty well, beating out four other cards. Yes, I
am probably being nicer about this because one of my own
picks is coming up soon, and after nominating it I
realized I was wrong. ;)
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