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Dual Ball
Hello and welcome to another week of Pojo’s CotD. For
the next couple of weeks we will be looking at some
recently-released Trainers, which makes a nice change
from reviewing the actual Pokémon. There’s only so many
ways I can find to say ‘a retreat cost of one isn’t bad’
and ‘Lightning Weakness is terrible’ before I start
boring myself, never mind the people who actually read
these reviews.
Anyway, Dual Ball is a potentially very useful card that
doesn’t get played much (if at all). Why? The key is in
the word ‘potentially’.
Dual Ball is a Trainer with a simple effect: flip two
coins, and for each heads you get to search your deck
for a Basic and put it in your hand. There are a few
good things about this: the Basic goes to your hand, not
the Bench (unlike Great Ball), so you can use it for
Basics with coming-into-play Powers like Uxie, Azelf,
Mesprit and . . . ummm . . . Torkoal UL! Being a Trainer
is also pretty nice, as you are free to play this in
multiples and in conjunction with your Supporter for the
turn.
Being a Trainer rather than a Supporter is not always an
advantage though. As anyone who has faced a deck with
Spititomb or Dialga G in it will tell you, Trainer lock
can really hurt. The main drawback of Dual Ball,
however, is (you guessed it), the flippy factor.
In this format, with so many low-Energy big-hitting
Pokémon around, a fast and consistent set-up is crucial
if you don’t want your game to end before you even get
started. For this reason, players will almost always
choose the foolproof options of Pokémon Collector,
Roseanne’s Research, and Call Energy in order to set up
their Basics. Although Dual Ball offers you a decent
chance of getting at least one search, getting out
Basics is just too important to trust to a couple of
coin flips, and deck space is usually much too tight to
fit in a card like Dual Ball.
Even a very fast, Trainer-based, Ball Engine kind of
deck would probably prefer to run PokéBall over this.
Although it only gives you one flip, it does allow a
search for ANY Pokémon, and is therefore more flexible.
Better still, run four Pokémon Communicator with four
Pokémon Collector, and you’ll get the Pokémon you need
without having to rely on coin flips at all.
Rating
Modified: 1.75 (Can do a useful job, but there are more
reliable solutions)
Limited: 4 (any kind of search is excellent in Limited)
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