Dangerous Drill – Pokemon Review

Vince

Only useful for dark decks, and is a weaker version of Faba. The discard of a Dark Pokemon may hurt if you don’t anything to get them back, though Darkrai-GX laughs at this requirement.

• Standard: 3/5
• Expanded: 3/5
• Limited: 3/5

Otaku

Dangerous Drill (SM – Team Up 138/181, 192/181) is a Trainer-Item which requires you discard a [D] Pokémon from your hand in order to use it. Then you must do one of the following three things:

1. Discard a Pokémon Tool from one of your opponent’s Pokémon
2. Discard a Special Energy from one of your opponent’s Pokémon
3. Discard a Stadium card from the field

That means, should you need to “burn” a copy of Dangerous Drill just to thin out your hand, you’ll still have to have a [D] Pokémon you can spare in hand and something you can target for the discarding effect on the field; it is okay for the target to be immune to Dangerous Drill’s effects, so long as it can still be targeted i.e. Prism Star Stadiums. With so many draw effects dependent on your own hand size, being able to play a card just for the purpose of lowering your hand’s size can be surprisingly important.

Dangerous Drill allows a single “slot” in your deck to threaten three commonly played, and often vital, resources in this game. Sounds good, but there are many caveats. Many (most?) Special Energy cards, Stadium cards, and Tools are the kind a player benefits from using on their own turn, or sometimes even going into an opponent’s turn (Shrine of Punishment). As such, discarding them from the field is just to reduce their return as your opponent has already received some benefit by the time you do. It may even prove to be a total waste, as Special Energy and Tools hit the discard pile when the Pokémon to which they are attached is KO’d, while you automatically discard an existing Stadium when you go to play a new one to the field. Even when you can use Dangerous Drill to do something, it just may not be overly beneficial.

Needing a [D] Pokémon to use as discard fodder was a good way of ensuring that this piece of Type support actually functions as Type support, instead of being easily worked into mostly off-Type decks. From a game design perspective, that is how I want things to be, but for what Dangerous Drill requires to be a serious presence in the competitive sphere, this greatly limits it. I’m not able to pour over tournament results at the moment, so a very quick, Ctrl+F search of a few of the larger, semi-recent events gives us one or two hits for Dangerous Drill in the results of Regional Championship that was held in Denver, Colorado on April 6. Seems two folks ran Zoroark-GX backed by both Lycanroc-GX (SM – Guardians Rising 74/145, 138/145, 156/145) and Weavile (SM – Ultra Prism 74/156), and also included a single Dangerous Drill. One of those players managed 21st place, while the other took 53rd. Not a stellar finish, but still really good considering this tournament had a total of 640 competitors.

Just not good enough to “prove” this is the new way to build Zoroark-GX/Lycanroc-GX/Weavile. On the PTCGO, I’ve been using it in a deck that that is purely [D] Typed, save for some [C] Type Basics that Evolve into [D] Types. The deck has some major consistency issues, both in terms of actual deck flow but also in terms of damage output; I’m hoping our next set will help a little with that, but I’m not optimistic. What is nice is that, between several other useful, generic Stadium cards and having the option of using my copies of Dangerous Drill on my opponent’s Stadiums (if they drop them early), I have a solid chance of winning the Stadium war… and having it end with my copy of Black Market {*}. I don’t bring this up because the deck is especially good (it isn’t), but because it demonstrates how useful Dangerous Drill can be. If Darkrai-GX or Nanu were worth the effort right now, this would be another natural combo for them.

Ratings

Standard: 2/5

Expanded: 1.8/5

Limited: 3/5

Unfortunately, that’s all I’ve got for Dangerous Drill. It appears to be a non-entity in Expanded, and why not? Faba is already something of a rival for it in Standard, being a flat out better option if you can spare your Supporter that turn and Expanded has VS Seeker so that one Faba can become up to four! When it comes to Limited Format play, there are no Special Energy cards in SM – Team Up and odds are decent you won’t pull enough worthwhile [D] Types to have them in your deck unless you’re running them just as Dangerous Drill discard-fodder… and while there are some good Tools and Stadiums to worry about, even I don’t think it is worth it unless you have enough Darkness Types to be a real part of your deck and also serve as discard fodder.