Accelgor – Fusion Strike
Date Reviewed: January 24, 2022
Ratings Summary:
Standard: 2.0
Expanded: —
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is horrible. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Blocky
Dragon
Accelgor is a Grass-type Fusion Strike Pokemon from Sword and Shield: Fusion Strike. It’s a stage 1, which means it has to evolve from Shelmet. There is only one Standard-legal Shelmet, also from SwSh Fusion Strike, and it is filler. Accelgor has 90 HP, which means it’s likely going to get OHKO’d if it’s in the active spot. However, it means you can search it, along with Shelmet, with Level Ball. It’s battle style is Fusion Strike, allowing it to access a tiny amount of Fusion Strike support. Its fire weakness is not that bad, especially considering it’s probably going to be one-shot anyway. It has no resistance, which again doesn’t really matter. Its retreat cost is just 1 energy, low enough to pay to retreat.
Accelgor only has one attack, Ninja Tornado. This costs one grass energy and two energy of any type, and does 120 damage. Alone, this would be bad enough that it wouldn’t see any play. However, its text says that if Accelgor moved from the bench to the active spot this turn, the attack’s cost is reduced to just a single grass energy. 120 damage for one grass energy is great. This can be achieved in two main ways. The first way is to either retreat Accelgor and then use a switching effect to get it back to the active spot, doing that but vice versa, or using two switching effects (since you can only retreat once per turn). The second way is to bring in a benched Accelgor after your active pokemon is knocked out. Since Accelgor only has 90 HP, the second method is probably going to happen more often. Not too much setup business needs to be done to get this going. But is 120 enough to justify probably 1 Accelgor knocked out per turn? 120 isn’t enough to OHKO pretty much any serious attacker, except for some weak single prizers. Grass type can hit most darkness and fighting types for weakness, and after weakness, you can KO most Vs. Not VMAXs, though. You can also boost Ninja Tornado’s damage using Power Tablets, +30 each. Even though you still won’t be able to OHKO Vs when not taking into consideration weakness, being able to 2HKO Vs as a disposable single prizer that is easy to bring back from the discard pile and find using Level Ball is good enough for a budget deck for me. Mew VMAX can also copy Ninja Tornado, but there are many much better choices to copy such as Meloetta’s Melodious Echo, which does more damage if there are just 2 Fusion Strike Energy attached to your pokemon. Mew VMAX also can’t benefit from the cheaper cost effect.]
Overall, Accelgor is a good single prize attacker, but it can’t OHKO Vs, and like most other single prizers, it’s weak to spread. Still, Accelgor is good enough for me that it gets 2 in my book. Its art looks unnecessarily messy, so only a 1.5 on that.
Also, if you want a single prizer who has a very cheap attack, I would just use rapid strike malamar. It can do way more damage at a similar or possibly even better consistency than Accelgor.
Standard: 2/5
Art: 1.5/5
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