Busy
busy busy.
I didn’t want to
miss a chance to review all of the sneak peak cards, so here is a highly
abridged review of Team Galactic’s Mars. This new Supporter is what I hope
to be a new era of Pokémon: the return of cards to manipulate the opponent’s
hand. I avoid the more common term of “hand control”, like I’d use to
describe these cards in Yu-Gi-Oh, because that is most definitely what we
don’t want: true dominance over another player’s hand is no fun at all for
that player, and victory is hallow for the controller. No, Pokémon is best
when you have just manipulation: you can mess with their hand and spoil
complex plans (even if it requires a little bit of luck). Mars lets you
draw two cards, so it still gives you a little push towards setting your own
side of the field up. The random loss of one of their cards, even if it is
just to the bottom of the deck is still a solid advantage: even if they have
a card that lets them retrieve it, they have had to use a resource up on a
card they originally already had. I mean, it is rather annoying to use
Celio’s Network for a Pokémon and then have to use a second copy the next
turn for that same Pokémon, instead of getting the next stage or using a TV
Reporter to draw more, etc. It’s less annoying if they have a Dusk Ball
(it’s eating up a Supporter that really hurts), but that only works for
Pokémon. Obviously if you used Scott to set up for the next few turns worth
of Supporters, it is so not happy for one to be sent back to the deck.
This might even
be handy for Unlimited: there are some older hand manipulation cards, but
the problem is that they either hit you as well or are luck based, for the
most part. So a smaller, simpler-but-guaranteed Supporter can actually
help.
As for Limited,
it’s a must since its draw power as well.
Ratings-
Unlimited: 3/5
Modified: 4/5
Limited: 4.5/5
