Baby Mario
2010 UK
National
Seniors
Champion |
Gigalith
53/98 (Emerging Powers)
So, let’s see how relevant the week has been so far by
taking a look at Gigalith,
the Stage 2 form of Boldore.
On the face of it, it seems pretty durable. 140 HP is
nice, and Grass Weakness isn’t much of a factor right
now. There are a few Pokémon that can one-shot it for
quite a lot of Energy (RDL, BadBoar,
Magnezone), but most will
struggle and even the Unova
Dragons find themselves needing a couple of
PlusPowers. Unsurprisingly,
the Retreat cost is disgusting. If this thing is active,
you leave it there or play Switch.
Gigalith
is one of those cards that has
its own little combo, with the first attack meant to
provide the Energy to power up the second. Shear costs
just one Fighting Energy and allows you to discard the
top 5 cards of your deck and attach any Fighting Energy
you find there to Gigalith
(note: it must be your active
Gigalith, you can’t use it with a Benched one,
which would have made it marginally more viable). This
is difficult, not to say impossible, to accomplish
effectively. There is no practical way in the game to
stack Energy on top of your deck (Research Record would
be the nearest thing), so you have to run a ton of the
stuff, meaning much less room for consistency cards and
decent Pokémon lines. Honestly, you would be much better
off using Electrode Prime, which digs through the top 7
cards without wasting an attack and can be used to
activate Twins when you knock it out. The second problem
is that using an attack to accelerate Energy gives your
opponent a turn to bring Gigalith
within easy OHKO range. So you go through all the effort
of stacking it with Energy, only to get off one attack
before it all hits the discard pile. When you are
spending that many resources, you are never going to
keep up in the Prize exchange.
And what do you get for all your efforts to attach
Energy to Gigalith? Well,
the answer is nothing at all that justifies the amount
of work involved. Rock Bullet cost 4 Energy of any
Colour, but that cost is misleading as the base damage
if you pay for it that way is just a pathetic 40. To
make the attack worthwhile, you need to be using
Fighting Energy exclusively as Rock Bullet does 20 more
damage for each one attached.
Even with four Fighting though, the damage output is
just 120, which is terrible value. It won’t even
one-shot a Reshiram or a
Tornadus (has Resistance)
without some PlusPower help.
Don’t be taken in by the deeply unreliable Shear: what
you have here basically is a Stage 2 Pokémon that does
120 for [F][F][F][F], and
that’s not good. I can think of far easier ways to
output that kind of damage, and I’m sure you can too.
Rating
Modified: 1.5 (The Electrode combo might make something
out of it, but it’s still a poor card)
Limited: 2 (Use Shear at all and you will likely deck
out, plenty of Grass Pokémon in the set too . . .)
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virusyosh |
Happy midweek, Pojo readers! Today we're going to
review the evolution of our two previous Cards of the
Day, which is also gaining some steam in my area as a
fun deck. Today's Card of the Day is Gigalith.
Gigalith is a Stage 2 Fighting Pokemon. As I
mentioned yesterday, Fighting Pokemon are incredibly
rare with the exception of Donphan Prime, meaning that
there is somewhat of a niche for them in our Modified
metagame (especially given that powerful threats like
Zekrom, Magnezone Prime, and Zoroark all have Fighting
Weakness). Gigalith has a sturdy 140 HP, meaning it
should be able to take at least one unboosted hit, even
from the likes of the legendary dragons and other heavy
hitters. Grass Weakness is very good to have in Modified
(but not so much in Emerging Powers Limited), no
Resistance is unfortunate, and while a Retreat Cost of 4
is gigantic, it's not at all unexpected for this huge
rock. Therefore, when building a deck with Gigalith,
make sure to have a few Switch handy.
Gigalith has two attacks that work together. Shear
costs a single Fighting Energy and allows you to discard
the top 5 cards of your deck, attaching any Fighting
Energy you find there to Gigalith. This attack provides
a nice form of Energy acceleration for Gigalith,
especially given that if you build a deck around this
card, you'll probably be running a lot of Fighting
Energy, which also works very well with Gigalith's
second attack. Rock Bullet deals 40 damage plus 20 more
damage for each Fighting Energy attached to Gigalith,
and not only is it powered up by Shear, but it also can
use Double Colorless Energy in order to hit a bit
faster. While starting off at 40 damage is fairly weak
especially for the cost, chances are that Gigalith will
be hitting for 80-120 damage, depending on whether or
not you can power it up with Fighting Energy, Double
Colorless, or both. 120 damage for 4 Energy isn't that
spectacular, but if you manage to somehow get 5 on
there, Gigalith can OHKO many common threats, which is
appealing.
Modified: 2/5 Shear provides a decent form of
acceleration, but unfortunately you need to use an
attack in order to do so. Additionally, Rock Bullet
starts off fairly weak, and needs a lot of Energy to
work. Therefore, Gigalith is much too slow to be a Tier
1 deck in Modified, but that's not to say that it
doesn't have potential. However, given that there aren't
really any other ways to accelerate Fighting Energy
right now, Gigalith will continue to be a step behind
faster decks.
Limited: 3.5/5 Gigalith is decent in Limited, but
does have its drawbacks. Rock Bullet has the potential
to do massive amounts of damage here, and it's very easy
to build a deck around Gigalith and Shear. That being
said, Gigalith is incredibly slow, and since Grass-types
are incredibly common in Emerging Powers Limited,
meaning that Gigalith may have trouble with powerful
Grass-types in the set.
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