Otaku |
Two weeks down, two
weeks to go as our Top 20 Cards Lost To Rotation
countdown finally busts into the top 10 and - Hammer and
tongs! - we start with Blacksmith (XY:
Flashfire 88/106)! Apparently working with a
blazing furnace and hammering metal isn’t good enough to
get a Full Art.
As a Trainer card,
Blacksmith can benefit from the cards that aid
general Trainer usage, like Trainers’ Mail.
There are general Trainer counters, but like Venomoth
(XY: Phantom Forces 2/119) they look more
effective than they have actually proven. Probably
intentional as there was a Pokémon in the past - Slowking
(Neo Genesis 14/111) - with a similar trick to
the Venomoth in question and Slowking was
so strong it was eventually banned. As a Supporter
Blacksmith has to compete a bit harder for deck
space than Items; you are only allowed to use one
Supporter per turn so too many and you risk your hand
and draws full of many cards that are effectively dead
in hand. Supporters are so restricted because the
worthwhile ones have potent effects, usually better than
Item cards, which are another major branches of Trainer
cards but which have no restriction on the amount you
may use in a turn. Supporters have an amazing
piece of support in the form of VS Seeker, which
allows you to reclaim a Supporter from your discard
pile. This is quite relevant as it changed not
only how Blacksmith has been used, but how
Supporters in general have been used. While there
is always the risk of Item lock or not having a
worthwhile Supporter in your discard, much of the time
VS Seeker acts as a “floating” Supporter,
allowing TecH to be reused, staples to be maxed out, or
even exceed being maxed out, without there literally
being 4+ copies in your deck. I don’t recall there
being a competitive Supporter counter, just stuff like
Stoutland (BW: Boundaries Crossed 122/149)
looked like they had potential but never paid off.
Blacksmith
allows you to attach two [R] Energy from your discard
pile to one of your in play Fire Type Pokémon; as the
designers have taken pains so as not to have any Energy
that provides [R] while in the discard pile except
for basic Fire Energy, that means two very real
restrictions on top of being a Supporter. This is
both Fire Pokémon and basic Fire Energy support, though
the former can be fudged a little with Stage 1 Pokémon
thanks to Flareon (XY: Ancient Origins
13/98), as its “Flare Effect” Ability causes all of your
Stage 1 Pokémon to count as a Fire Type in addition to
their actual Type(s). Any Fire Type that needs two
or more Energy, with at least two of those Energy being
[R], [C], or a mix of [R] and [C] requirements can
benefit from Blacksmith, though not all of them
may need Blacksmith, or at least as much as they
need some other form of Energy acceleration. It is
nice that by being basic Energy focused, Blacksmith
can play well with Max Elixir, Scorched Earth,
Volcanion, and Volcanion-EX ; part of what
hurts Burning Energy is that it doesn’t (plus the
various Fire Types that don’t discard their own Energy
as part of attacking). Blacksmith has been
reviewed once before; it was the
sixth place
finisher for the top 10 list we did for XY: Flashfire.
I say “we”, but this was when only Baby Mario and Hez
were reviewing. So back then, I agreed with Baby
Mario, and in fact was probably expecting more out of
Blacksmith than he; I figured this would cement Fire
Types near or at the top at least until some more of the
other Types got their own Type support. I was
wrong.
My overly detailed
walkthrough of Blacksmith was not just my own
compulsion to write my reviews in such a manner; this
time it helped illustrate what was going against
Blacksmith at first. Fiery Torch and
Scorched Earth weren’t living up to their hype
either, and we had Lysandre as a generic clutch
Supporter play that was not a draw or search
effect. At this time it meant that Fire Type decks
struggled to afford using their Supporter usage on
Blacksmith. A lot of the new and old Fire Type
attackers either didn’t need Blacksmith - like
Flareon (BW: Plasma Freeze 12/116) - or did
but couldn’t quite make it as competitive decks, give or
take an initial flare up in popularity - like
Charizard-EX (XY: Flashfire 12/106, XY:
Black Star Promos XY121) and Pyroar (XY:
Flashfire 20/106). Seismitoad-EX hit us as
of the next set, further dampening the prospects of Fire
Types and Blacksmith. XY: Phantom Forces
brought us Battle Compressor and VS Seeker,
but also Lysandre’s Trump Card and some other
stuff that helped existing strong decks and/or hurt Fire
Types, but those two Items would prove important soon
enough. As we’d soon see though that those two
Items made Blacksmith so much easier to use; toss
it and two basic Fire Energy into the discard,
then VS Seeker for Blacksmith and attach
the Energy to one of your Pokémon. Eventually we
hit XY: Ancient Origins; XY: Roaring Skies
gave us Shaymin-EX (XY: Roaring Skies
77/108, 106/108) while XY: Ancient Origins gave
us Entei (XY: Ancient Origins 14/98),
Entei (XY: Ancient Origins 14/98), and
Trainers’ Mail. Basically we had what we
needed for a fast, hard-hitting Fire Type deck that used
Blacksmith and Double Colorless Energy to
fuel massive [RRCC] attack costs in a single turn, while
the Item engine and Shaymin-EX handled your
draw/search without costing you a Supporter.
That deck died out,
but the Fire Type has continued to get new attackers.
A set like Generations, which largely felt like
filler, still ended up giving us Flareon-EX. XY:
Steam Siege was intentionally meant to bolster the
Fire Type and gave us Volcanion and
Volcanion-EX. Now the Fire Type had a big
Basic that could attack for damage while attaching [R]
Energy from the discard pile, and a Bench-sitter that
upped the damage of attacks by your Fire Type Basic
Pokémon for the low cost of discarding [R] from hand
(and it stacked, though that meant multiple copies of
Volcanion-EX and of Fire Energy to discard).
It didn’t create the deck that won Worlds or anything,
but even post rotation, this deck is alive and kicking,
placing (but not winning) in recent Regional
Championships. So in Expanded play, Blacksmith
remains a great card for Fire Type decks; as long as
they run even a couple of basic Fire Energy
cards, it can do wonders as a single, sometimes in
multiples, and in some decks you want to even max it
out. In Limited play you just need to have a Fire
Type or two from the set and it’s worth running, other
than Fletchinder (XY: Flashfire 17/106).
Just make sure said Fire Type is also worth running
(most probably are).
So what if
Blacksmith were still legal for Standard play? Volcanion/Volcanion-EX
decks would get a boost, making them stronger. Not
some vast swing though; the deck already does an
excellent job by hitting hard with Volcanion
while powering up other attackers on the Bench. I
am not overly familiar with the top lists, but I would
not be surprised if Max Elixir is also already
there so that even without Blacksmith, the deck
can try to access bigger attackers more quickly.
Which is why Blacksmith and its loss only matters
so much, especially without Battle Compressor to
combo with VS Seeker, Blacksmith, and two
basic Fire Energy cards.
Ratings
Standard:
N/A
Expanded:
3.65/5
Limited:
3.5/5
Summary:
So Blacksmith is still a key card in certain
decks in Expanded, giving it a bit of an odd looking
score; being useless off Type and having some
alternative options for Energy acceleration means even
though it seems like well designed Type support, it
doesn’t fall into “Max out or lose!” territory.
Which itself is not a bad thing; the drawback of
simplifying things with numerical scores. Same for
Limited; if you don’t get the Fire Types it’s a waste
while if you don’t also get stuff like Fiery
Torch and/or Scorched Earth, you’ll need more
effort to prep for Blacksmith. If
Blacksmith stuck around for Standard play, seems
like the same story we have in Expanded, except
less deck competition and a few other key differences
means it would have scored higher, but not by a huge
margin (probably an additional tenth of a point).
Collectively,
Blacksmith snagged 29 voting points, just edging out
last Friday’s
Super Scoop Up by a single point. It missed
tying tomorrow’s subject by two points, so it’s pretty
close in this part of the list. I had
Blacksmith as my 13th place pick, basically because
while it is a very good, the decks I see most likely to
use it would be improved but in a dramatic way by it
suddenly being reprinted, give or take an Entei (XY:
Ancient Origins 15/98) focused deck being possibly
resurrected. At this point, we have many cards
that are just as good or better, either in similarly
specialized roles (like Type support) or for general
usage. Not a huge upset though; I just like
explaining my thought process from constructing my own
list.
|
Zach Carmichael |
When the Primal Clash-on rotation
was first announced, one of the first decks that piqued
my interest was Volcanion. A deck that could potentially
thrive on the immense energy acceleration from
Blacksmith, it seemed to be something that would
dwindle down and eventually be nothing more than binder
fodder. However, that did not happen at all. Despite
losing Blacksmith, the deck has emerged recently
as one of the frontrunners of the Standard format,
utilizing cards like Max Elixir and Scorched
Earth to hit hard as early as the first or second
turn of the game. While Blacksmith was certainly
a strong Supporter and shed light on a number of
Fire-type attackers, I don’t think it will be as missed
as originally thought.
Blacksmith allows you to
attach two Fire Energy from the discard to one of your
Fire-type Pokemon. In the XY-on format, this allowed
Pokemon like Entei from Ancient Origins to
emerge out of nowhere and swiftly take City
Championships last winter. Combined with discard cards –
namely Battle Compressor and Acro Bike –
Entei was able to quickly get powered up and deal
massive amounts of damage to continually pressure your
opponent while holding favor in the prize trade. Had
Blacksmith been reprinted in Steam Siege, the
same would hold true with Volcanion-EX for the
most part – possibly to a greater extent. Being able to
use its “Steam Up” Ability to stack damage has already
proven to be deadly, and the deck will continue to
thrive because of this. But Blacksmith could have
brought it to another level. While Battle Compressor
might be gone, we still have cards like Scorched
Earth and Ultra Ball to discard Energy cards.
This would have allowed Volcanion-EX to get fully
powered up right away versus having to rely on multiple
Max Elixir and possibly whiffing.
In Expanded, Fire-type decks are
pretty nonexistent for the most part. This is due to
Seismitoad-EX variants that can now hit for solid
damage thanks to Max Elixir for Energy
acceleration, particularly in Water Box variants that
feature a myriad of attackers. Greninja is also
very popular in Expanded thanks to greater consistency
through cards like Computer Search. Blacksmith
might help in some regard by providing means of
acceleration for early prize leads, but in the long run
Fire decks like Volcanion struggle to keep up with this
highly diverse format.
Ratings
Standard: N/A
Expanded: 2/5
Limited: 2/5
Summary: Blacksmith
enabled a number of Fire Pokemon to become successful in
competitive play, with decks like Entei/Charizard
sweeping mid-tier tournaments like City Championships
this past season. However, Max Elixir has proven
to be a suitable replacement that outclasses
Blacksmith in some ways simply because it is an Item
card that can be played multiple times versus a
once-per-turn Supporter. Volcanion is a deck that serves
as a testament to this notion, as it continues to be one
of the best decks as of this post. In short,
Blacksmith provided a means to make Fire-types
playable again in a format where they had not gotten
much attention, but this is no longer the case thanks to
greater variety in Energy acceleration.
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