Otaku |
Welcome to another
Throwback Thursday, where we review (or re-review) an
older card. Last week we looked at something legal
for play in the Expanded (BW-On), Legacy (HS-series
releases, Call of Legends, and BW-series releases), and
Unlimited (all releases, a few banned cards) Formats.
I didn’t mention the Unlimited Format because I haven’t
played it in years, or read a credible account of its
current state; this has not changed, so don’t expect
much (if any) Unlimited Format discussion. If
someone knowledgeable about the current state of
competitive Unlimited Format play is reading this, Pojo
is almost always looking for additional reviewers, and
probably wouldn’t mind someone who only weighed in on
Throwback Thursdays (hint hint). Today’s subject
is only legal for the Unlimited and Legacy
Formats, and we’ll only be looking at it with respect to
the latter: Celebi (HS: Triumphant
92/102).
This Celebi
is better known as Celebi Prime. The
HeartGold & SoulSilver series shows how the game itself
slowly Evolves, as it kept some of the trappings of the
previous generation (or generations, for mechanics that
had been established even further back), then added a
few new things LEGEND Pokémon that were split between
two different cards (and you needed both halves to put
them into play). Pokémon Prime are another of
those additions and helped to demonstrate the pending
power creep of the Gen V sets. They also may have
been an attempt at getting people used to what would
become the usual structure for premium pulls.
While “Common”, “Uncommon”, “Rare” and even “Secret
Rare” are pretty straight-forward as a rarity scheme,
the next step beyond “Rare” is the “Holographic Rare” in
Pokémon, as opposed to a more generic term such as
“Super Rare”. For most of the BW-series and
XY-series releases, after that would come Pokémon-EX, an
“Ultra Rare”. Pokémon Prime were the “Ultra Rares”
of the HS-series of releases, and sets would contain a
different version of the Pokémon at a lower rarity.
So “Prime” is not part of the card name, and unlike some
similar denotations in the game, it isn’t even part of
an in-game mechanic such as when I referred to
last week’s
Throwback as Weavile [Plasma].
Celebi
Prime is a Grass Type Pokémon, allowing it to score
double damage against many Water Types and a decent
section of Fighting Types due to Weakness. The
Legacy Format has nothing Grass Resistant, and the only
standout Grass Pokémon specific support I can think of
is Metapod (HeartGold/SoulSilver 46/132).
No worthwhile anti-Gras Type effects (towards Pokémon or
Energy), either. There are some great Grass Type
attackers like Genesect-EX (BW: Plasma Blast
11/101, 97/101), as well as effects based upon [G]
Energy, such as what is found on Virizion-EX
(which actually has a good attack, as well).
Anti-Grass Pokémon or Energy effects either don’t exist
in this card pool, or they do and I utterly failed to
find them with a quick search, but if they are out
there, I’m not running into them. Celebi Prime
is a Basic Pokémon, which is the best Stage: no extra
space or time required to Evolve can function as your
opening Active, some good Stage support (Skyarrow
Bridge, Prism Energy, etc.), and a natural
synergy with certain other effects. There aren’t
even as many effective anti-Basic effects in this
format. Celebi Prime has 60 HP, which meant it
wasn’t especially durable back then and is a probable
OHKO in the Legacy Format. The small upside is
that Weakness becomes less important; many Fire Types
won’t gain much benefit from Celebi Prime being
Fire Weak because they already would have scored a OHKO.
Celebi Prime has no Resistance, so we’ll move
onto the Retreat Cost of [C]; this is low enough that
most of the time you’ll be able to afford it, but for
combo purposes, I’m telling you right now to include
stuff like Skyarrow Bridge or Switch or
both.
Celebi
Prime has a Poké-Power, which is similar to an Ability,
but mechanically distinct when it comes to card effects
talking about them. Also, most Poké-Powers would
shut off if the Pokémon sporting them as affected by a
Special Condition, and that is true for this one as
well. “Forest Breath” may only be used once per turn,
while Celebi Prime is Active; it allows you to
attach a [G] Energy from hand to one of your Pokémon in
play, without it using up your manual Energy attachment
for the turn. Provided you can get them each into
the Active spot, you may use multiple copies of Forest
Breath in a single turn, each once. Though it
requires something to get Celebi Prime out from
up front, this is good Energy acceleration, not only
speeding up your initial assault but potentially helping
you to recover when your opponent does KO something. The
card also has an attack, “Time Circle”, which costs
[GPC]. It does 30 damage and protects Celebi
Prime from the damage (but not effects) of Stage 1 and 2
Pokémon during your opponent’s next turn. That
isn’t much protection or damage for the Energy involved;
even when this card released, there were some strong
Basic Pokémon with whom a player could attack, and in
the Legacy Format, Basic attackers are still the most
common. Forest Breath is good if you know
how to combo it; when this card first released, the
cards to optimize it weren’t there, and so this card
wasn’t used much. You might be able to tell from
our review of it
here,
which was a few months after it released and hadn't
accomplished much.
The only other
Celebi legal for the Legacy Format is Celebi
(HS: Triumphant 3/102). That was another
thing about Pokémon Prime; they would be released
alongside a non-Prime counterpart that occupied a lower
rarity slot, though not much lower in this case as this
Celebi was a holographic rare. They also
were typically much weaker than their Prime counterpart.
This Celebi is still a Basic Pokémon with no
Resistance and Retreat Cost [C], but this time it is an
80 HP Psychic Weak Psychic Type with two attacks.
The first attack is “Future Sight” for [P], which allows
you to look at the top five cards of a player’s deck
(pick yours or your opponent’s), then rearrange them as
you wish. It can be helpful, but not that
helpful. For [GC] it can use “Leaf Bind” instead,
doing 30 damage and letting you flip a coin to try and
Paralyze the opponent’s Active. This card wasn’t
worth it back in the day and isn’t used (at least not
seriously) today. The only Celebi card to
release during the BW-era was Celebi-EX, and as
it has a distinct name, you could run four of it
alongside four Celebi Prime, no problem. It
doesn’t particularly combo with Celebi Prime, so
we aren’t going to worry about it today.
During the last
part of the BW-era, before we started getting XY-era
releases, that Genesect-EX and Virizion-EX
I mentioned earlier? That made up a deck known as
VirGen and it was one of the strongest in the format. Virizion-EX
protects against Special Conditions via its Ability
(“Verdant Wind”) and can attack with “Emerald Slash” for
a quick bit of damage while attaching two [G] Energy
from the deck to one of your Benched Pokémon. Genesect-EX
has an Ability (“Red Signal”) that acts like a
Lysandre when you attach a Plasma Energy Card
from hand to itself, forcing up the opponent’s Active of
your choice should you choose to activate it. For
[GGC] it could attack with its “Megalo Cannon” to do 100
damage to the opponent’s Active and 20 to one of his or
her Benched Pokémon, and if that wasn’t good enough you
could slap on the Ace Spec Pokémon Tool G Booster.
G Booster had an attack by the same name that
also required [GGC], then had you discard two Energy
from the Pokémon using the attack before doing 200
damage to the opponent’s Active; G Booster (the attack)
also ignored all effects (but not Weakness/Resistance)
on the opponent’s Active. Together, the two would
set up to try and stream OHKO’s, or at least 2HKO’s.
Many decks were still relying upon Hypnotoxic Laser
and Virbank City Gym for some extra damage
counter placement (and sometimes stalling) at the time,
Verdant Wind took care of that. The deck is still
around in Expanded, but no longer a powerhouse.
The Legacy Format
adds, besides some of the general use options, Celebi
Prime for alternate/additional Energy acceleration and
Metapod to deal with your Fire Weakness. Skyarrow
Bridge allows everything but Metapod to
retreat for free. This means that, ideally, you
open with Celebi Prime, attach a Grass Energy
via Forest Breath to Virizion-EX or Genesect-EX,
and retreat into something else. Exactly what
depends on the situation. If you are going second,
then a manual Energy attachment after Forest Breath
readies Virizion-EX to attack. You may also
attach to Genesect-EX, as a manual Energy
attachment plus a successful use of Colress Machine
well enable it to attack as well! You might also
bring up another Celebi Prime; if you have a
Switch and another Grass Energy handy, you
can just enjoy another spare Energy attachment. If
you have a Plasma Energy in hand, you could then
(for instance) use it for your manual Energy attachment
and trigger Red Signal; quite nasty if you can follow up
with an attack, and potentially useful even if you
cannot. Smeargle (HS: Undaunted 8/90;
Call of Legends 21/95) was reviewed
here
during our Legacy Format Week, and it may also show up
in this deck… which makes it a primo tag partner for
Celebi Prime; do your business (especially first
turn) attaching Energy via Forest Breath, then bring up
Smeargle to try to and copy a useful Supporter
from your opponent. Junk Hunt also helps, as it
allows you to reclaim used copies of Switch and
even the Ace Spec G Booster. VirGen decks,
like Weavile [Plasma] decks, are one of the
strongest competitive decks in the Legacy Format.
Ratings
Standard:
N/A
Expanded:
N/A
Limited:
4/5
Legacy:
3.75/5
Summary
Celebi
Prime isn’t a must run for all decks, but it is pretty
important to most (maybe all) Grass decks. At the
same time, if you lack it, you can still run a Grass
deck. I haven’t been able to snag any yet on the
PTCGO, but my VirGen deck performs well enough for me to
still use it. It would just be notably better if I
did have Celebi Prime in it. No score for
Standard or Expanded because Celebi Prime isn’t
legal there, and good luck finding and affording a
Limited event that uses HS: Triumphant boosters
(great pull if you do, though). In the Legacy
Format, being great for one of the top decks, good in a
few others, and not worth running in the rest still
gives it a pretty high score.
|
aroramage |
Well now here's a major throwback.
Today we get to cover Celebi (Triumphant 92) - or as
she's better known "Celebi Prime". This is one of the
Pokemon Prime cards that were big in the HGSS era, as is
my understanding. Pokemon Prime weren't particularly
different from other Pokemon cards though, they were
just generally more powerful than your regular Pokemon.
They were meant to replace the mechanic from the DPPt
era, Pokemon Lv. X, which in turn replaced Pokemon ex
before them.
I didn't play during the HGSS era,
but I had heard that Celebi Prime was a powerful card
back in those days, so let's take a look at what might
have caused all of that. Her attack in Time Circle is a
3-for-60 hit, which considering the overall HP on
Pokemon was much lower than it is in today's game,
that's actually not that bad. The highest amounts were
around 150 HP usually, which would be about the same as
a regular Stage 2 in today's game - go figure. This
meant that Celebi Prime could 3HKO anything with ease,
with 2HKOs on most anything in the game at the time. On
top of that though, Time Circle gave Celebi Prime the
effect of canceling out any damage from Stage 1 or 2
Pokemon the opponent used against her - not too shabby
in formats focused on the evolutions.
But the main draw to Celebi Prime
is in her Ability-er, sorry, Poke-Power. This is an
important difference, as Abilities weren't a thing back
in the days of Triumphant, so anything referencing
Abilities don't affect Poke-Powers and vice versa. Same
applies to Poke-Body, which is another term used in
those days and beyond. Anyways, Celebi Prime has Forest
Breath, which as long as Celebi Prime is the Active
Pokemon allows you to attach a Grass Energy to a Pokemon
you control once per turn. Energy acceleration is always
a good thing, although these days we're used to and
prefer it coming from the discard pile if we can, but
back in HGSS, I imagine this was pretty useful.
In fact, it must have been useful,
as Celebi Prime has since appeared in a number of decks
over the course of its lifespan in Standard. The most
notable of these came within the HGSS-onward rotation,
known as "CMT" - standing for Celebi, Mewtwo-EX, and
Tornadus. Using Celebi Prime in the Active Position to
start, the aim was to power up either Tornadus-EX or
Mewtwo-EX with its Forest Breath power and then Switch
things around to unleash a devastating blow. It was
pretty effective as a whole, winning numerous
championships from state to nationals and even made a
showing in the Top 8 at Worlds 2012. The deck though has
since been crippled, with the new rulings about no
attacking on the first turn combined with the errata on
Pokemon Catcher, which was used in the deck to notable
effect, and Celebi Prime might not be in her Prime
anymore.
...or is she? There is one format
available that will still take her in, and that is
exclusive to the Pokemon TCG Online - yeah, that little
advertised space with every pack and deck you buy that
comes with the little QR code. There, Legacy formats
exist, meaning any cards from HGSS on can be used - and
that includes stuff like Forest of Giant Plants and,
most recently, cards like Decidueye-GX. Perhaps here
Celebi Prime can gain new life with being the great
Grass accelerator of such decks, or maybe she can star
in her own little role in VirGen decks. Who knows? The
list goes on.
Celebi Prime has a couple of good
qualities going for it. Sure, she's only got 60 HP, but
hey, she doesn't give up an extra Prize to your
opponent! Gotta say that's pretty nice, and it's just
another iteration of card types that could always
inspire something for the future. Or heck, maybe it can
even come back.
Rating
Standard: N/A (this format of
course excludes Pokemon from Celebi Prime's time, but
for the sake of her own time frame, I'd say she's a
solid 3.5/5)
Expanded: N/A (that 3.5/5
pertaining mainly to her noteworthy Poke-Power and
attack, though faulting the low 60 HP she has)
Limited: 4.5/5 (I'd imagine though
that anything with acceleration for your other Pokemon
along with the power to keep evolved Pokemon at bay was
really useful for those days)
Arora Notealus: Celebi Prime is a
fairly balanced card, all things considered. It may be
the case that Pokemon Prime in general were balanced for
their time, but throw in a card pool of 180+ HP Basics,
and it's hard to see where the good starts in
comparison. Pokemon-EX really outclassed most of the
specialty classes before them, but you never know when
the next big resurgence will be.
Next Time: A tasty treat in present
day!
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