aroramage |
Hey! Hope you guys didn't miss me
too much, but don't worry, I'm back in time to review
the Top 5...er, 4 cards in the list! To be fair,
Startling Megaphone is great tech against Tools in
general, so what more is there to say about that anyway?
I digress, now we get to a group of cards that have
shaped the game ever since their inception: the Night
March Crew.
Surprisingly, this is only a set of
 three
cards: Lampent, Pumpkaboo, and the outlier Joltik. Each
of them have their own strengths and weaknesses and
differences, but they all share one common feature: the
Night March attack. Night March is very simple, dealing
out 20 damage for every Pokemon in the discard pile that
also has the Night March attack. Figuring in the total
of 4 copies of each of these guys, any one of them can
deal out as much as 220 damage - enough to OHKO almost
anything in the game, outside of Mega-EXs!!
And that's not even including any
other damage boosts that can be applied!
Now for the differences between the
group. Let's start with Pumpkaboo, who is otherwise
equipped with the 1-for-10 vanilla Ram attack. His Night
March attack costs 3 of any type of Energy, he's got 60
HP, and he's a Basic Pokemon, so he's easy to get out
and can be powered up in any way. Effectively, he's the
middle of the road between these three and really more
of a back-up to your main attacker in the build. And no,
that is not Lampent.
Of the three, Lampent is the
slowest,
being a Stage 1 Pokemon and requiring one of his 3
Energy for Night March to be Psychic. Sure, he does a
little better than Pumpkaboo with 70 HP and has a decent
attack with Cursed Drop, placing 3 damage counters down
in any way you'd like for 1 Energy, but with the
requirement of another Pokemon to even get put into play
and requiring that one specific Energy for Night March,
he really only serves the purpose of fueling the other
Pokemon's Night March attacks.
That leaves us with Joltik, the odd
one out and yet the best one. Unlike the other two, he's
an Electric-type to their Psychic-type, allowing him to
hit other Pokemon a lot harder than the others could and
without risking getting destroyed by being Weak to his
own type. He's also got the advantage of having the
cheapest Night March attack at only 2 Colorless Energy,
meaning that yes, a DCE will do it. Ignoring Gnaw,
Joltik becomes extremely dangerous...but he is extremely
vulnerable too; with only 30 HP, most any hit will take
him out very easily.
So now you've got the idea of the
deck in a nutshell: load up your discard pile with
Lampent and other Night March attacks, and then use your
Joltik and maybe even Pumpkaboo to wipe out your
opponent's team long before they can even get up and
running. Night March wants to set up quickly to deal out
massive damage and steamroll opponents mercilessly, and
with cards like Battle Compressor and Professor
Sycamore, it was easy to thin out the deck, find that
much-needed DCE, and start mashing through opponents.
Bet you're glad they added the
whole "can't attack on the first turn" clause now.
Rating
Standard: N/A
Expanded: 4.5/5 (the cards
themselves aren't inherently powerful or devastating)
Limited: 4/5 (but with the right
set-up and speed, they can wreck shop very very quickly)
Arora Notealus: The speed of the
Night March deck, as well as its easy accessibility,
ultimately gave it the edge that has made it the best
deck in the format for the past few years, with
competition only stemming from a few small counter
decks. As time went on and players saw more and more of
it, it didn't top as much but remained fairly popular to
use, and that gave a lot of power to a deck that
otherwise might not have had such potential without
certain cards...course now with Karen it might not see
so much play, but at the very least people have a great
counter to it without structuring their entire deck to
beat it.
Next Time: The definitive Tool of a
generation!
|
Otaku |
Our fourth place
finisher isn’t just a two-for-one, but a three-for-one!
Why? Not because we had three cards tie
perfectly but because we have three cards so closely
related that they are interdependent: you cannot
properly review one without reviewing the others.
So time to cover the Night March trio: Joltik (XY:
Phantom Forces 26/119), Lampent (XY:
Phantom Forces 42/119), and Pumpkaboo (XY:
Phantom Forces 44/119). As these are three
different Pokémon from separate Evolution lines, united
by a rarely used game mechanic, I won’t be going into my
usual level of depth, but I’ll still detail these three
specifically before really diving into the deck,
because almost every aspect of these cards has proven
relevant during their tenure as one of the best decks in
Standard and/or Expanded play. Plus odds are I’ll
have to write some article in the future and having a
nice, thorough CotD covering the cards, their deck, and
their history of usage will be really handy when this is
all just a vague memory.
The only thing they
all have in common is a lack of Abilities, Ancient
Traits, and the attack “Night March”. Each has a
different attack cost for the attack, and I’ll detail
that when I do cover them individually, but for now know
the attack does 20 damage times the number of Pokémon in
your discard pile that have the Night March attack.
That means a range of zero damage to 220 before other
modifiers, as so far there is no Pokémon which copies
attacks from cards in the discard pile. Joltik
is a Basic Lightning Type with 30 HP, Fighting Weakness,
Metal Resistance, and a Retreat Cost of [C]. It
can “Gnaw” for [L] to do 10 damage and Night March for
[CC]. Lampent is a Psychic Stage 1 Pokémon with
70 HP, Darkness Weakness, Fighting Resistance, and
Retreat Cost [CC]. For [P] it can use “Cursed
Drop” to place three damage counters on one of your
opponent’s Pokémon (your choice which) and for [PCC] it
can use Night March. Pumpkaboo is a Psychic Type
Basic Pokémon with 60 HP, Darkness Weakness, Fighting
Resistance, and Retreat Cost [CC]. It can use
“Ram” for [P] to do 10 damage and its version of Night
March costs [CCC].
Being a Basic is
the best and having one Lightning Type attacker and at
least one Psychic Type helps hit a decent amount of
Weakness; Resistance can be handled by alternating
between the two, assuming you cannot just punch through
it with overwhelming damage. You might think
having two different Types would result in no Type
support being used, but most Night March builds rely
on Dimension Valley, and among the exceptions
some still include a copy or two for Pumpkaboo.
Being a Stage 1 means Lampent is discard fodder
for the Night March attack. Players have tried to
find a way to use it (or for that matter the others) by
Evolving all the way and then using Celebi-EX or
Shrine of of Memories to still access Night
March, but it has never proven successful. The low
HP means Joltik and Pumpkaboo are glass
cannons, expected to attack and then be OHKO’d by the
opponent; with Fighting Fury Belt or luck they
can sometimes avoid this fate but usually it’s a done
deal. Quite significant is that the low HP scores
makes Night March vulnerable to damage spread, or even
just a bonus Bench hit. With the low HP scores you
might think Weakness a non-issue, and it almost is for
Joltik as it just means any Fighting Type that
can does more than 10 damage before Weakness ends
up with a OHKO (and that means nearly all Fighting Types
which see competitive play). Darkness Weakness
makes Pumpkaboo an easy OHKO for Darkness Type
attackers, most notably Yveltal (XY
78/146; XY: Black Star Promos XY06;
Generations RC16/RC32; XY: Steam Siege
65/114) and its “Oblivion Wing” a power play, relevant
because Yveltal is such a solid opener for
various Darkness Type decks. Metal and Fighting
Resistance are appreciated, however: -20 damage won’t
matter often due to the HP scores but I’ve seen games
won or lost by it. The Retreat Costs seem small,
but are a huge issue for Night March decks because they
tend to run little in the way of extra Energy; expect
them to pack some Trainers to help with it.
All the attacks
other than Night March have no real significance;
Lampent doesn’t attack so even though Cursed Drop
might be handy, it isn’t used. Gnaw and Ram may or
may not be an option depending on the exact Night March
variant, but when they are used it means something went
wrong because you ought to be attacking with Night March
in a Night March deck. That is because of the two
Night March Pokémon that do see play, they have low
enough attack costs, at least with some simple combos,
that if it isn’t Turn 1, you should be able to afford to
use Night March. Double Colorless Energy covers
the [CC] cost on Joltik and with Dimension
Valley in play it also handles the now reduced to
[CC] cost on Pumpkaboo. Some variants
include other Energy acceleration, like
Bronzong (XY: Phantom Forces 61/119; XY:
Black Star Promos XY21) so that the attack costs can
be covered some or entirely with basic Metal Energy.
Between Acro Bike, Battle Compressor,
Professor Juniper or Professor Sycamore, and
Ultra Ball it’s bad luck or a bad build if your
deck cannot dump at least a few Night March Pokémon into
the discard pile ASAP.
It may be hard to
believe, but at first Night March wasn’t that great of a
deck. Why? It debuted in the same set as
Lysandre’s Trump Card; an opponent might Battle
Compressor to discard his or her own copy of
Lysandre’s Trump Card, then use VS Seeker to
recycle everything (other than copies of Lysandre’s
Trump Card) back into each player’s respective deck.
Though Night March would get all of its deck thinning
tricks and Double Colorless Energy back while
keeping its field, it would have to try and re-setup.
Making it trickier is that cards like Shaymin-EX
(XY: Roaring Skies 77/108, 106/108) that were
still in play… were still in play; you now had to get a
good open on what was actually your second, third, etc.
turn and with less (or even no) Shaymin-EX to
keep things moving. Now giving up your Supporter
to do this to your opponent often meant neglecting the
setup for your own side of the field, but that was okay;
Night March attackers were often so small you just
needed to be able to attack to score a OHKO or at least
a 2HKO. Facing such a thing was also quite
frustrating for the Night March player, increasing the
odds of them going on tilt and making misplays.
Many of the sets after XY: Phantom Forces also
added something to help Night March decks: Acro Bike
in XY: Primal Clash, Trainers’ Mail and
Shaymin-EX in XY: Roaring Skies, Unown,
Hex Maniac, and Vespiquen (XY: Ancient
Origins 10/98) in XY: Ancient Origins, and at
least a few others have kept Night March on or near the
top, even as counters for it (or something it needs)
have been released.
Another side of it
though is that a lot of what I just mentioned: so many
things that benefit Night March are not just for
Night March. Night March ends up using or even
relying upon cards that help out several other decks,
often most other decks. This means the skill
required for running it often transfers in some capacity
from or to running/building other decks. Some
critics have labeled Night March a deck deck that
requires no skill. Even adjusting for the
hyperbole, this is absurd, and I learned that first hand
from running it, though if you’re honest and accurate in
your deck analysis, it should be readily apparent.
It is a relatively straight forward deck in its
approach: fill your discard pile with Night March
Pokémon and take OHKOs with Pokémon that are usually
worth only a single Prize, require a single Energy
attachment, and don’t Evolve. Against other
competitive decks Night March usually has a good
chance of winning, but some bad luck or a misplay hands
it to the opponent as the margin isn’t huge. Your
opponent will be taking Prizes almost as quickly
as you are, at least at first. Most of its bad
matchups still allow it a reasonable chance of winning,
and where Night March is favored, it tends to be quite
lopsided. That isn’t the same thing as not
requiring much skill; the deck has so many moving pieces
and so many times you’ll have to choose carefully what
to use, what to discard, and when that it pretty easily
falls apart. I do understand people who grew bored
facing it, because it became such a common sight, but
that isn’t the same thing as not requiring skill.
Being so common
brings up another point: Night March is technically a
budget deck. Given how pricey Shaymin-EX
currently is and how that card has never been
inexpensive, that might seem like a foolish statement. Most
decks want one to three Shaymin-EX, even if they
hope to only actually play one or two to the field: no
sense penalizing Night March for at worst wanting an
extra one or two Shaymin-EX over the norm.
When builds with the “average” amount of Shaymin-EX
are the best option, Night March is basically a budget
deck; everything in it tends to be Commons or Uncommons
(including the Night March Pokémon themselves) and the
exceptions are near universal and/or low card count
options. Another way Night March bucks the trend
is that it took what would normally be filler Pokémon
(two Evolving Basics and an Evolving Stage 1) and made
them either main attackers or at least staples.
Even Lampent being discard bound still makes it
more important to Night March than the average Evolving
Stage 1, only included in case Item lock,
search/recycling demands, or something deck specific
make running Rare Candy alone a poor option.
When so many players complain about the game revolving
around Rare/Holo-Rare big Basic Pokémon and “Ultra Rare”
Pokémon-EX, the would-be filler Evolving Pokémon being
the deck focus should have been a breath of fresh air…
and for some of us it still kind of is.
While still
Standard legal, the Standard Format’s metagame
eventually evolved to revolve around Night March.
Even when it wasn’t the top deck, all top decks needed
to have an edge over it to truly be viable. Mostly
this meant a metagame focused on Item lock, disruption,
or damage spread. Sometimes there would be
wall/stall or just a deck that denied OHKOs. Night
March decks could be built to handle all of those, but
not at once and in the end Night March was not
the top deck for the 2016 World Championships. In
the Masters Division Night March decks managed to finish
in both the sixth and seventh place, but the deck was
heavily played, and if it really was the be-all end-all
deck, even in a hostile metagame it should have done
better. It did better in the Seniors Division but
still stopped out at third place, and actually did a bit
worse in the Juniors Division where it only managed to
finish in eighth place.
So how is it doing
now in the Expanded Format? At the Regional
Championship held in Phoenix, AZ (USA) on October 1st
and 2nd, by the end of it all it looks like the best
performing Night March deck came in at 9th place, with
five other Night March variants making the Top 32.
This is a very good performance, but if Night March was
the best deck in the format, it should have a great
showing here. This tournament is also expected to
be Night March’s last hurrah because it occurred shortly
before Karen became tournament legal. As
that Supporter is a nerfed Lysandre’s Trump Card,
you should expect it to hamper Night March: upon closer
examination you should realize it probably kills Night
March and Vespiquen decks (and of course the two
run together) and counters them far more severely than
Lysandre’s Trump Card. There is the same
shuffling of Pokémon back into the deck, but
Lysandre’s Trump Card showed some pity to Night
March because it also returned draw/search, Double
Colorless Energy, etc. Imagine your opponent
stuck with Night March Pokémon swinging for no damage
and your opponent has few or no cards left to add
Night March Pokémon to the discard pile. Even if
no Prizes have yet been taken, odds are against the
Night March deck making a comeback. That means not
only does Night March have to face many strong decks
that have a natural edge over it, but also any
deck could TecH in a copy of Karen and in this
format, have Battle Compressor plus VS Seeker
or Jirachi-EX to quickly fetch it.
I’m predicting Night March is done here.
If you manage to
engage in some Limited Format play with XY: Phantom
Forces, Night March Pokémon are unpredictable.
Your opponent may simply be running them for their
Evolved form, or perhaps he or she has enough to
actually focus on Night March. This set contains
Battle Compressor so you have an option other
than allowing three of your Night Marchers to be KO’d to
do decent damage. An extremely lucky player might
pull multiple Battle Compressor and sufficient
Night March Pokémon to make the deck work, and remember
that in Limited play the “four per deck” restriction
does not apply. If you pull five Joltik,
you may run them all. Dimension Valley is even
in this set as well… but odds are you won’t get enough
of any of them to matter. Now what about a
hypothetical reprint for these cards, making them once
again Standard legal? You need all three to be
reprinted (or else more Night March Pokémon released) or
you won’t be able to hit hard enough for it to matter.
Even assuming you get three Night Marchers (so you can
have up to 11 Night March Pokémon in the discard pile),
even if Karen is seldom played, Night March would
still probably be a mortally wounded or dead deck. Battle
Compressor is gone. Dimension Valley is
gone. Mew (XY: Fates Collide 29/124) is
still here, but with no Dimension Valley you’ll
have to include Energy acceleration (Max Elixir?)
or try to focus exclusively on attacking with Mew
and Joltik. No more AZ or Super
Scoop Up, so you’ll have to Ninja Boy away
your Shaymin-EX to avoid your opponent using them
to avoid an unfavorable Prize trade. Muscle Band
is gone but Fighting Fury Belt remains, which
might sound good but Fighting Fury Belt probably
helps opposing decks far more. Like I said, no
Battle Compressor, so filling your discard pile with
the exact Night Marchers you won’t be needing is
more difficult, and without Startling Megaphone
or Xerosic you will have to punch through
those boosted HP scores. The only bright side is
that some of the decks with a favorable matchup against
Night March like Trevenant BREAK and Greninja
BREAK decks also lost key cards, either killing that
deck or leaving it far less effective.
Ratings
(Collective)
Standard:
N/A
Expanded:
2/5
Limited:
2/5
Summary:
If you skipped straight to the Summary, you might be
wonderings what is wrong with me. Five pages long
with about a one page summary is pretty bad. If
however you are disappointed because you believe Night
March is still a top deck, or even worse believe it to
be “...the most brokenest deck ever!” Oh no; Pokémon
began with broken decks even in the Base Set,
when only card scarcity kept most of that set viable in
the face of the original Haymaker and Rain Dance decks.
We’ve had way worse since then (after all, cards have
been banned before). Plus as I tried to explain,
it was not even the most unbalancing aspect of
Standard when it was Standard legal, or in Expanded
prior to Karen. Night March was
perhaps the overall best deck for much of the
Standard/Expanded metagame post Lysandre’s
Trump Card ban, but by the end the metagame adjusted
and it was just another really good deck. I could
honestly still call it “broken”, but that is because I’m
the guy who says the entire competitive metagame has
horribly pacing and card balance (re: all the metagame
is to some extent broken). At least in some
places, you may have found me trying to explain how
Night March does (or at least did) require skill
to do what it did and that beating it was mostly a
matter of working on your own skill and not
pursuing a long shot in the metagame. Had we
removed Night March from the equation back then, the
metagame would have been different, but mostly
just some shuffling around of what was already working
because the anti-Night March decks were usually strong
against a lot of other things.
Had we re-reviewed
Night March prior to rotation and Karen, the
Pokémon themselves would not have scored that
high. Lampent was/is only run to be another
Night Marcher in the discard pile so a two-out-of-five
would be generous. The other two are glass cannons
that rely heavily upon combos to do their thing, and are
so fragile that even Mew-EX was run alongside
them to serve as an alternate attacker. A
Pokémon-EX with only 120 HP and that depended
upon its Ability was still sometimes a preferable, more
durable choice; that says something. Joltik and
Pumpkaboo would probably score three-out-of-five,
maybe upwards of three-and-a-half-out-of-five.
Now? I am being generous giving them a
two-out-of-five in case someone comes up with something
clever or the metagame shifts in a way that
Karen is not a worthwhile piece of TecH in enough
decks. Even pre-Karen in tournaments
where Night March variants were (collectively) the most
run deck, they still crashed into stuff that shut them
out of first place or being the runner up, with the
most recent of those results seeing them just miss
the Top 8. We are adding Karen to
all that.
So the Night March
trio garnered 39 voting points. We agreed ahead of
time to treat them as a single entry, so we avoided any
messiness there. This beat out yesterday’s
Startling Megaphone by two voting points, and only
missed tying for third place by one point. I
basically just wrote a long-winded, rambling piece
explaining why this should not have been the case.
I wish I had started writing this review two weeks ago
so that by now it would have been concise and more
coherent, but hopefully if you really did read it (or
just pay attention to what works and how it works), the
only reason you’re disagreeing with me is because you’re
thinking of this list as more of a “Top Cards of 2016”
list (that is something we’ll probably be doing soon
enough) and so being awesome for so long still makes you
want to rate these cards highly. I don’t agree
with that criterion, but I totally understand it.
If rotation had not occurred, Night March would
have taken a big hit thanks to Karen TecH, as no
rotation would mean it retained its various bits of
support but also that almost every deck would have room
and justification to include Battle Compressor,
VS Seeker, and Karen. As Night March
was already seeing diminishing returns prior to
rotation, I believe this would put them into
functional-but-non-competitive territory. Vespiquen
was still doing well enough that even if Night March
wasn’t worth countering, Vespiquen might be.
Have rotation occur, but just reprint Joltik,
Lampent, and Pumpkaboo? If you’re me
then you include them as the 20th place position mostly
because you cannot bring yourself to leave them off the
list entirely.
|
Zach Carmichael |
Today is Tuesday, and we will
continue our list of cards lost in the Primal Clash-on
rotation with the notorious group of Pokémon that
wreaked havoc on the format for so long – the Night
Marchers. Combined with cards like Battle Compressor and
Shaymin-EX, the trio was able to deal godly amounts of
damage and quickly overwhelm opponents for a single
Energy attachment. With this in mind, perhaps these
cards rotating isn’t such a bad thing, as it will enable
a number of decks to now shine in the spotlight and see
competitive play.
The Night Marchers consist of
Pumpkaboo, Joltik, and Lampent from Phantom Forces. They
all have the Night March attack, which does 20 damage
times the number of Pokémon with the Night March attack
in the discard. They were quickly disregarded upon
release, as it was difficult to actually get them in the
discard besides using Professor Sycamore and Ultra Ball.
Mew-EX was a solid partner, though using a Pokémon-EX
defeated the idea of winning the prize trade with
multiple non-EX Pokémon. Battle Compressor was a thing,
but again, the deck simply was not fast enough to keep
up with big threats like Seismitoad-EX, which served as
a hard counter by preventing Items from being played.
All of this changed with Shaymin-EX was released.
Alongside Acro Bike, you could now burn through
practically the entire deck in a span of just a couple
turns, letting you quickly discard your Night Marchers
and hit for KOs as early as the first turn by easily
finding that Double Colorless Energy. Adding to this was
Puzzle of Time, which let you reuse cards from the
discard, making counters like Enhanced Hammer nearly
useless.
At the 2016 US Nationals, Night March players were able
to correctly predict the meta filled with Seismitoad-EX
and Greninja variants by including Vespiquen in their
decks. Its Bee Revenge attack paired nicely with the
theme of discarding Pokémon and enabled the deck to
effectively combat Water-types. The Jirachi XY promo
also played a role here, as its Stardust attack shut
down Seismitoad-EX and Giratina-EX to give them an out
to play their Items and Special Energy again, at least
for a turn or two. It’s a shame that the deck didn’t
perform so hot at the World Championships – ultimately
losing to decks like M Audino-EX – as it would have been
a blast to casually play the deck with friends when the
2016 World Championship decks are released in a few
weeks.
In Expanded, Night March lives on.
Archeops is a great addition to the deck, as its Ability
shuts off Evolution cards in a pinch, giving the deck an
out to Greninja and Trevenant BREAKs. Special Charge
from Steam Siege also gave it a boost, making the deck a
bit less reliant on Puzzle of Time (though it’s still
played because why not?). Water Box decks will continue
to be a threat, but often times the sheer speed and
power of Night March is enough to conquer Seismitoad.
Ratings
Standard: n/a
Expanded: 4/5
Limited: 1/5
Summary: Most players are
relieved knowing that Night March is gone in Standard.
Cards like Puzzle of Time and Shaymin-EX made the deck
overpowered, to the point where it continued to dominate
tournaments with ease up until the World Championships.
It seems the card developers continued making the deck
stronger and stronger just as players would seemingly
find ways to counter the deck, but thankfully this will
no longer be an issue. Despite this, Night March will
continue to live on in Expanded, and I wouldn’t be
surprised if future cards will make the deck even
stronger.
|
