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Darkrai
LV X (Great Encounters)
Muahahahahahaha
. . . it’s Darkrai LV X, not
so much a card as a cautionary tale for Pokémon players
everywhere: especially those who are tempted by the lure
of hype.
As a Pokémon, Darkrai is
pretty high up on the scale of scary: a creature
consisting of tattered shadows and fog that causes
people unending nightmares, it is one of the very few
(the only?) Pokémon to be portrayed in the video games
as being actually evil.
When translations/spoilers for this thing began
appearing online, Darkrai
started getting the sort of hype that makes all last
year’s fuss about Lost World seem like a storm in a
teacup. Japanese copies of the card (which were playable
outside of Japan back then) changed hands for
extortionate amounts of money, and when the English
version hit town the going rate for a single copy was
$100+.
It didn’t take very long for the bubble to burst and for
Darkrai LV X’s value to
plummet. There were two main reasons for this: firstly,
it was released as a tin promo, making all of those
‘early adopters’ who shelled out big money very sad
Bunearys indeed; secondly,
it turned out to be more or less rubbish.
But how could this be? Just look at
Darkrai’s amazing PokéBody
that makes all Dark Energy count as Special Dark! See
how its broken attack puts your opponent’s Pokémon into
a deep Sleep and is capable of inflicting OHKOs on
anyone who gets unlucky with their coin flips! How could
it possibly fail? Well, the answer to that question lies
in the format that existed at the time. A format
dominated by the combination of
Gardevoir and Gallade.
Sure, they might even let your resource-laden
Darkrai LV X take Prize,
then they would slap a
Scramble Energy on Gallade,
hit it for Weakness, and send it straight to the discard
pile. Sure, you could try setting your second one up
(under Gardy’s Psychic
Lock), but the same fate awaited it. Essentially, the
card was unplayable as an attacker.
Yes people tried to use it as a bench-sitting tech in
Tyranitar decks, or as part
of a combo with Weavile SW
and Blissey MT, but LV X
Pokémon do not make the best bench techs (they need to
be active to Level Up), and its presence tended to clunk
up T-tar and Blissey more
than it helped them out. I don’t believe
Darkrai was ever part of any
genuinely successful deck while it was legal, and the
number of people trying to make it work eventually
dwindled to zero.
The moral of the story?
No matter how great a card looks in isolation, it is the
format that determines its worth. Remember that, and you
won’t ever have nightmares over the amount of cash you
just dropped on a piece of pure hype.
Rating
Fear Factor as a Pokémon: 4.5
Fear Factor as a TCG card: 1.5
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