Otaku |
At last, it is time
to countdown the top 10 cards of Sun & Moon, as
determined by the aggregate efforts of aroramage, Zach,
and myself! As usual, each reviewer submitted his
own personal top 10 list, and the results were averaged
out to produce the list we are actually using.
Reprints were not permitted for the list; we
already know a card like Ultra Ball is good (and
actually pretty hard to top)!
Today we have two
reviews going up instead of one, as we had to take
Monday off; seems like a cynical Valentine’s Day gift as
we give you an extra review that isn’t really extra,
kind of like the person who holds off showing affection
to those he or she cares for until a holiday (like
Valentine’s Day) instead of doing so year round, with
holidays like this providing an avenue for extra
expression. With my acknowledgement of such things
out of the way, time to look at our fourth place
finisher, Umbreon-GX (Sun & Moon 80/149,
142/149, 154/149)! Right now, being a Pokémon-GX
is a pretty good gig; you give up an extra Prize when
KO’d (like Pokémon-EX), but the only other effect that
references Pokémon-GX is the “Lunar Fall-GX” attack
found on Lunala-GX, and instead of punishing
their usage it rewards it by excluding them from its
automatic KO effect of a Basic Pokémon. We know
from releases already out in Japan, however, that this
will not last, and Pokémon-GX counters are coming.
Being a Pokémon-GX also guarantees a GX attack, but even
though it is supposed to be a more powerful (and thus
better) attack since you may only use it once per
game, sometimes they fall flat. These are the
things mechanically guaranteed by acknowledged design
templates for Pokémon-GX. So far all of them
also receive a substantial HP boost and, unlike with
Pokémon-EX, all have had at least 50 more HP than
their “regular” counterparts, some with 100 extra HP.
If that remains true, it is another credit to being a
Pokémon-GX.
Umbreon-GX
is a Darkness Type, allowing it to strike some Psychic
Type Pokémon for Weakness, but also meaning all Fairy
Types Resist it. This is not good, though it isn’t
especially bad; some Fairy Types will leverage this
Resistance well but often -20 isn’t going to change
things much, while damage doubling Weakness is still a
broken mechanic so even though you won’t run into
Darkness Weak Pokémon all the time, it’s quite the
payout when it happens. Counters specific to the
Darkness Type exist, but never proved worthwhile.
Their Pokémon Type specific support has one real
standout - Dark Patch - available only in the
Expanded Format. What makes this still a great
Type, I think, is the [D] Energy Type based support
(that is not also Pokémon Type exclusive) and
stable ot potent Pokémon that, as usual, can perform
well off Type or in mixed company, but excel in a
Darkness Type deck. Hard not to be impressed by
the type that has given us Pokémon like Yveltal-EX.
Umbreon-GX is a Stage 1 Pokémon, making it a bit
slower than Basic Pokémon, but even ignoring some
special shortcuts just for Eeveelutions, losing one turn
to Evolving isn’t enough to prevent a good Stage 1 from
proving competitive. Its 200 HP is a hardy amount,
tricky (but far from impossible) to OHKO. We’ll
discuss it a bit more when I cover some of the other
Umbreon cards. Fighting Weakness is dangerous,
and as it is one of a couple key Fighting Weak cards, I
expect this to begin to matter as more people seek to
exploit the Weakness again. Even if not, I keep
running into Passimian decks (budget or
otherwise) so be prepared. Resistance normally
isn’t a big issue, but a big HP score may change that.
The Retreat Cost of [CC] is low enough you can pay it,
but high enough you’ll usually prefer avoiding it; build
your deck accordingly.
Umbreon-GX
brings three attacks to the party. First up is
“Strafe”, which does 30 damage for [D] and gives you the
option of Benching Umbreon-GX afterward.
There are better hit-and-run Pokémon, but for the Energy
the sum total of damage and effect are good. I
wouldn’t build an entire deck around it, but only
because there are better options for this sort of thing.
The second attack is “Shadow Bullet”, which costs [DCC]
and does 90 damage to the opponent’s Active plus
30 damage to one of his or her Benched Pokémon (you
choose which). You’ll need to use that Bench
damage well to keep pace with most other decks, but with
the correct combos you won’t do just that but pull
ahead. We’ll discuss the specifics later, but know
that the Energy cost and particulars of how the damage
is split matter. “Dark Call-GX” rounds things out, with
a cost of [DC]. It allows you to discard two
Energy from your opponent’s Pokémon. The wording
can be misleading; not only may you select Energy from
two different Pokémon, but one or both Energy can
be from two different multi-unit Energy cards.
In other words, you can use Dark Call-GX to discard up
to two different Double Colorless Energy by
selecting one unit of Energy being provided by each; the
other unit just goes along for the ride and is also
discarded! This could be brilliant, even broken,
as a regular attack, but as your once-per-game GX
attack; this is a waste against small-ish attackers you
can quickly KO, or decks where the Energy is easily
replaced, but can cripple an opponent’s offense where
the Energy supply is tight. Collectively, these
attacks provide Umbreon-GX a decent arsenal of
tricks, but again, to really prove competitive,
you’re going to have to supplement them.
The first way to
help Umbreon-GX is to use the correct Eevee.
I will not be elaborating upon every
Eevee and Eeveelution; this review is going up late
and many are just too unlikely to be worthwhile deck
partners or rivals. When it comes to Eevee,
BW: Plasma Freeze 90/116, XY: Furious Fists
80/111, and Sun & Moon 101/149 are the clear
winners. Those last two share the same Ability,
“Energy Evolution”; when an Eevee with Energy
Evolution has an Energy attached to it from your hand,
you may search your deck for a Pokémon of that Type
which Evolves from Eevee. If you do, then
you Evolve Eevee into that Evolution, regardless
of whether or not Eevee would normally be able to
Evolve under these circumstances. Seems like
either XY: Furious Fists 80/111, and Sun &
Moon 101/149 would be the Eevee to use,
unless your deck is trying to quickly lockdown
Abilities and/or your deck runs no compatible Basic
Energy cards. Pick between these two based on
format - XY: Furious Fists 80/111 - or specific
deck needs with the almost negligible differences
between their HP, Retreat Cost, and attack. In
Expanded, BW: Plasma Freeze 90/116 then becomes a
good choice as its “Signs of Evolution” attack costs
only [C] and searches your deck for up to three
Eeveelutions, though they must be different Types. BW:
Plasma Freeze 90/116 got its own review
here,
as did XY: Furious Fists 80/111
here.
I am not sure when, but I plan on having us review
Sun & Moon 101/149 in the future as well, where I
can go crazy and cover all the various Eeveelutions.
There are no other
Standard legal Umbreon-GX or Umbreon
cards, but there is Umbreon-EX. This is a
good opportunity to see how Pokémon-EX and Pokémon-GX
compare. Umbreon-EX is Darkness Type Basic
Pokémon with 170 HP, Fighting Weakness, Psychic
Resistance, Retreat Cost [C], and two attacks. The
first attack is “Veil of Darkness” for [C], doing 20
damage and allowing you to discard as many cards as you
wish from your hand, then draw a number equal to what
you discarded. Given the many combos involving
your discard pile, this is a solid attack. I
haven’t tried it myself or given it much heed, but I
believe some of the discard-centric decks like Night
March have tried this as a counter-counter to Karen.
The second attack is “End Game” for [DCC], which does 70
damage. This is a bit low for the cost, but there
is also an effect that might make it worthwhile: if you
use End Game to KO an opponent’s Mega Evolution, you
take two more Prize cards. That is in addition
to the two you usually get for KOing a Mega Evolution,
meaning four Prizes at once. I think I really need
to look at modern Night March builds and see what people
have been up to. We reviewed Umbreon-GX
here
but since then, I’ve mostly forgotten about it, save
opponent’s using it periodically. I don’t recall
ever seeing someone pull off that much vaunted KO for
four Prizes myself, so if I sounded overly impressed
just now, that’s because I’d practically forgotten about
this card’s tricks.
Umbreon-EX
actually could be used to backup Umbreon-GX; as a
Basic it shouldn’t be too hard to slip one in and it can
probably make use of most (if not all) of the same
support. Probably not worth it unless Mega
Evolutions are a fairly common sight in the anticipated
environment, unless you’re backing up your Umbreon-GX
with Vespiquen (XY: Ancient Origins 10/98)
and want the anti-Karen option (small
possibility). Now comparing and contrasting the
two is interesting; for running a Stage 1 worth 2
Prizes, we only have a +30 HP bump, but even ignoring
the GX attack I think Umbreon-GX has better
attacks. Umbreon-GX wishes it had that single
Energy Retreat Cost; Strafe and several cards you’d
still want to run even if Umbreon-GX had a lower
Retreat Cost help, but there are some nasty control
decks making the rounds; nearly losing an attack to
Strafe back to your Bench (and previous Active) can be a
very bad thing. There are multiple past Umbreon
cards, only legal for Expanded play. Again, I am
not going to look at them individually. In
fact the only reason to mention them collectively is
that they sport 90 or 100 HP, so being a Pokémon-GX
may have resulted in doubled Hit Points. Why
do I say “may”? Power creep has been happening
throughout the XY-era cards, and we have to remember
this is the SM-era now… which probably means more power
creep. A hypothetical XY-era release for a regular
Umbreon may have had more HP, as could a future
SM-era Umbreon as well. The latter we will
hopefully still see, but even incremental increases will
reduce how much of a bonus Umbreon-GX received
for being a Pokémon-GX. I doubt they would have
more than 120 HP, though.
Now for the part of
the cardpool that I know matters, from other players
stomping my own decks with them. Espeon-GX was
our
ninth place
finisher
for this countdown. This is a Psychic Type Stage 1
Pokémon-GX with 200 HP, Psychic Weakness, no Resistance,
Retreat Cost [C], and three attacks. First is
“Confuse Ray” for [C], doing 30 and automatically
Confusing the opponent’s Active. Second is
“Psychic” for [PCC], doing 60 damage plus another 30 per
Energy attached to the opponent’s Active. The GX
attack is “Divide-GX”, which allows you to place 10
damage counters as you see fit on your opponent’s
Pokémon. Thanks to cards like Professor’s
Letter and Energy Retrieval, running multiple
Basic Energy cards in a single deck is not a problem,
and if you aren’t worried about triggering an Energy
Evolution Ability, you could also use Rainbow Energy
to meet the one [P] requirement that are part of the
attacks on Espeon-GX. None of these attacks
are super-special-awesome, but not unlike those of
Umbreon-GX, they can prove magnificent under the
correct circumstances. Umbreon-GX does things
better, but covering different circumstances (especially
exploiting Weakness) should be worth the split Evolution
line.
Which brings us to
the next part of the typical Eeveelutions deck; more
Eeveelutions! Flareon (XY: Ancient Origins
13/98), Jolteon (XY: Ancient Origins
26/98), and Vaporeon (XY: Ancient Origins
22/98) each have an Ability that causes your Stage 1
Pokémon to count as its respective Type (Fire,
Lightning, or Water) in addition to whatever Types your
Stage 1 Pokémon already was. You’ll have to give
up an Eevee you could Evolve into Espeon-GX
or Umbreon-GX, but the reward is important.
Right now, Fire, Lightning, and Water Type Weakness are
all over the metagame, which means Shadow Bullet and
Psychic (the attack) go from good to amazing.
You can even include Wide Lens so that the Bench
damage from Shadow Bullet is also doubled.
I’ve seen some trying to incorporate a solid Grass Type
attacker as well; while there are still plenty of forms
of Weakness not being exploited, once you add in
Grass you’ve got six different Weaknesses covered.
The catch? Now we have a lot of cards all
tucked into the same deck, and that hurts reliability.
I mentioned Vespiquen earlier, but I’ve also seen
folks try this with Lurantis-GX. When it
works, it is a thing of beauty. I haven’t been
playing as much of the Expanded format lately; I believe
this could all work there as well, but don’t recall
running into it. Could just be my sampling size. Umbreon-GX
is a great pull for Limited, and you could even run it
on its own Pokémon-wise; just remember one Eevee
and enough basic Darkness Energy cards so that it
will Energy Evolve into Umbreon-GX ASAP.
Given the presence of Passimian I can’t recommend
this, however.
Ratings
Standard:
3.85/5
Expanded:
3.5/5
Limited:
4/5
Summary:
Given the Eeveelution sub-fandom, cards based on them
tend to see a lot of play even if they aren’t good
enough to justify it. This is not one of
those times; Umbreon-GX is a very good card that
acts as a great card once you factor in all the combos
available to it.
Umbreon-GX
earned 12 voting points from our collective lists, tying
with fifth place Professor Kukui. I
submitted this review late, late enough that I am aware
I completely messed up the placement of Professor
Kukui in the top 10 list and other cards relative to
it in his
CotD,
but not late enough that I’ve had time to fix it.
My apologies, and hopefully the correct review will go
up tomorrow. At least the two actually did tie,
and to break the tie I couldn’t use my usual methods;
both cards appeared on two of our three personal lists,
and in both cases one of the two lists was my own.
In the end, I actually rolled a die to see who would get
fourth place and who would get fifth.
|
