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Lost Remover
Hey guys, sorry about missing so many reviews. In the
unlikely event I complete the NinePhlosion article I am
writing, I will be writing a short article about Lost
World to give a little more information about why that
damned Stadium can and probably will kill Pokémon as we
know it. But more on that later.
Lost Remover is our last card for this week, and it
is a brilliant card (quite a rarity for the this set of
reprints, but I’ll take what I can get!). The simple
effect is to choose one Special energy attached to one
of your opponent’s Pokémon and put it into their Lost
Zone.
Energy removal as a strategy is not very popular at
the moment because so many decks have attacks that can
be powered with a single energy (or even worse, are free
to use!) and a few boosts from the bench. For the decks
that use a lot of energy, energy acceleration (typically
from the discard pile) is used to pick up the slack so
discarding an energy attached to your opponent’s Pokémon
usually won’t annoy them much, if at all.
The other reason that energy removal is so underrated
is that the only ways to remove energy from a Pokémon in
the current card pool are all based on attacks. Quite
aside from ending your turn, the attacks that remove
energy are almost all over costed with weak (or even no)
damage and/or require at least one coin flip. This ruins
the effectiveness of the energy removal since you can’t
depend on it and your Pokémon won’t be able to cut it in
a fight due to the low damage.
In fact, the only Pokémon capable of energy removal
you are likely to come up against are Typhlosion Prime
(which needs [f][f][c] to deal 70 damage and discard an
energy attached to each the Defending Pokémon and
itself) and Dialga G Lv X (it has a flippy attack to
remove energy to the Lost Zone that most players never
use).
However, back in the bad old days of Base Set, you
could play 2 different Trainer cards to remove energy
from your opponent’s Pokémon, the aptly named Energy
Removal and Super Energy Removal. These cards could be
spammed from the hand to remove several energy from your
opponent’s side of the field and obliterate their setup.
These cards are long gone, and like Gust of Wind they
have never been reprinted in their original, obscenely
powerful forms (though weaker versions have been
released).
The power of Lost Remover is that you can use it
several times in a turn because it is a Trainer and,
even better, there is no chance that your opponent will
be able to recover the energy since it is now in the
Lost Zone!
Sadly, Lost Remover only works on Special energy, so
the playability of the card all depends on how many
Special energy you expect to play against. There are
lots in the format, but will you face them?
I’ll list the likely targets and how much it is
likely to hurt the opponent when you swing your
ban-hammer down to banish their precious Special energy.
Metal Energy: This energy is stacked on a Pokémon to
reduce incoming damage from attacks, so removing it to
the Lost Zone will really make your opponent squirm as
their tanking strategy falls apart. Use Lost Remover
against decks using Steelix Prime and Dialga G.
Dark Energy: Again, players like to stack this card
on a Pokémon to make a brutal beast that will destroy
all it encounters, so lowering their damage cap will
hurt and may just save you. Lost Remover is effective
against Tyranitar SF/Prime players who love damage, and
against players who like to donk with Sableye SF.
Rainbow Energy: You will usually only see 1 or 2
copies of this card in a deck, and most likely it will
be on a Roserade UL which will use Rainbow Energy to
fuel its Poke-power. If your opponent needs the Rainbow
to attack then this card will hurt, but otherwise it
will only be a minor inconvenience. Not very effective
because so few Rainbow decks exist (and those that do
either run enough Basic energy to make Rainbow
unnecessary or run SP energy).
SP Energy: SP decks like to use this energy for
consistency, although the fact that they run Cyrus’
Conspiracy means that competent players run enough Basic
energy to cover their attack needs. So Lost Remover is
nothing more than an annoyance in this scenario, though
it is possible that your opponent will be critically
injured if they are short of energy at the time.
Double Colourless Energy: Your opponent will always
want to keep this card in play due to the amazing speed
it offers (Nidoqueen RR, Machamp Prime, Uxie Lv X, the
list goes on!). So Lost Remover will really tick your
opponent off in this situation. Unless your opponent is
using the DCE to cover a discard cost, in which case the
DCE won’t be in play long enough for you to remove it.
Garchomp C anyone?
Call Energy: This is used early game to grab Pokémon
rather than power an attack, so using Remove Lost will
be an inconvenience at most, causing your opponent to
pay another energy to retreat their starter. Don’t
bother using Remove Lost in this case unless you need to
play out your hand.
Warp Energy: As above, players drop this for the
switching effect and then forget about it, so playing
Lost Remover will merely be an inconvenience.
Cyclone Energy: Ditto the Warp and Call energy.
Health Energy: Read above.
Upper Energy: No-one uses this unless they don’t have
DCE in their collection, but if your opponent is relying
on this card for a fast attack, then Lost Remover will
cripple them.
Those are all of the Special energy I think are in
the format at this time, so the verdict is inconclusive.
Some decks will fear Lost Remover, some will laugh at it
as they only run Basic energy and/or won’t care about
losing the few Special energy they do use.
The one other problem with using Lost Remover is that
you have to play several of them in your deck to get the
most out of the effect, and most decks just don’t have
the space for that many situational counter cards.
However, all is not lost. With Junk Arm, you can run
a single copy of Lost Remover and retrieve it to reuse
it multiple times against the decks it will hurt, or use
it to pay the discard cost of Junk Arm if you are facing
a deck that doesn’t care about Special Energy.
In the end, this is a lovely little counter card that
may well cause a few surprise upsets while ever it
remains in the card pool.
Modified: 3.75 (it’s a great new take on an old
mechanic, and the no-retrieval clause of the Lost Zone
adds to the power of the card. The lack of flipping is
well balanced against the ability to only target Special
Energy)
Limited: 1.25 (are there any Special energy in this set?
You’ll be happy to take it for your collection though)
Combos with: Junk Arm
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