Arcanine
#13 (Next Destinies)
Hello and welcome to a new week of
reviews on Pojo’s
CotD. I hope
you are enjoying your Easter break. I
really feel as if we should be looking
at Togepi or
Lopunny
today, but instead we are going to be
reviewing one of the two
Arcanine
from Next Destinies (guess what’s coming
tomorrow).
While tomorrow’s card comes from the
Japanese Hail Blizzard Set, this one is
from a Battle Strength deck. If you are
familiar with how Japan tends to do
their cards, you can have a pretty good
guess that this one will be the weaker
of the two. This
Arcanine is a Fire Type Stage 1
with a decent-looking 120 HP . . .
unfortunately that is still short of the
‘magic’130 that requires
Reshiram and
Zekrom to
boost their attack somehow to one-shot
it. Being a Fire Type is a pretty good
thing these days: it makes handling
Durant decks a whole lot easier, and you
will rarely see a Water Pokémon to
threaten Weakness (the occasional
Kyurem NV or
Kyurem-EX,
if anything). The Retreat cost of three,
on the other hand, is just bad.
Arcanine
has two attacks, neither of which is
startlingly original or interesting. The
first, Crunch, costs [R][C]
and does 30 damage, plus gives you a
coin flip chance of discarding an Energy
attached to the defending Pokémon. The
damage output is poor value, and while
Energy discard is a very nice option to
have, putting it a flip means that you
can’t really count on this as a reliable
strategy. Nevertheless, it’s a nice
bonus if you can hit it, and Crunch
could have been a reasonable attack
to use while waiting for the Energy to
do something more impressive.
Except that
Arcanine hasn’t got anything more
impressive to do.
Heat Blast simply gives you a
vanilla 70 for [R][C][C].
In these days of 170+ HP Basic EX, a
card with a maximum damage output of 70,
and nothing much else to offer, has come
out inadequately prepared for the
format, and can expect to be sent back
to the binder pretty quickly, I’m
afraid.
And that is the fate which awaits this
Arcanine.
Rating
Modified: 1.75 (seriously underpowered,
with not much else to offer)
Limited: 3.5 (pretty good here. Energy
discard will hurt more, and a reliable
70 is something you can work with)
