Jellicent
(Boundaries Crossed)
Hello and welcome to another week on
Pojo’s
CotD.
Christmas is just around the corner, and
that means that soon we shall being
doing our top 10 countdown of the best
cards of the past year. Before then
though, we still have some unfinished
business with Boundaries Crossed.
We kick off the week with
Jellicent,
which may seem like a friendly, harmless
Mr Pringle lookalike, but is in fact
(according to various flavour texts) the
homicidal psychopath of the seas:
destroying ships and making castles for
itself out of the wreckage. Will it be
similarly terrifying to play against in
the TCG?
Of course not.
It’s just a piece of cardboard after
all. It’s also a Stage 1 with 110 HP,
which puts it just in range of some
common attacks (Darkrai-EX
w/ Dark Claw,
Tornadus-EX w/
PlusPower,
Keldeo-EX w/
three Water), but is solid enough I
guess. Lightning Weakness is ok at the
moment too, with only the occasional
Zekrom
seeing play as a tech. The Retreat cost
of three is
offputting though, so better
bring some Switches.
The most interesting thing about
Jellicent is
the Ability, Stickiness. This adds one
to the Retreat cost of
all your
opponent’s Pokémon. What’s more, it
stacks so that if you have two
Jellicent
out, the Retreat cost is two more, and
so on. This is useful for general
disruption, but has a number of specific
applications too: it severely messes
with Eelektrik decks which like to use
Skyarrow
Bridge to switch Pokémon between attacks
to charge them with Dynamotor. It’s
worth mentioning though that any effect
which sets a retreat cost to zero (like
Darkrai-EX’s
Dark Cloak Ability)
will not be affected by Stickiness.
This pretty much robs
Jellicent of
a lot of usefulness, considering how
much play Darkrai
is getting, and leaves those dreams of
partnering him with attack lock cards
like Cobalion
NVI or Beartic
EPO in ruins.
As an attacker,
Jellicent isn’t much to write
home about: Eerie light costs
three Energy
and does just 40 damage plus a coin flip
for Confusion. I suppose there is some
synergy with the Ability (Confuse and
make it tough to retreat out of it), but
that’s a very flip dependent kind of
lock and you are better off using other
attacks. At the end of the day,
Jellicent is
an interesting enough card with a bit of
potential: it’s just unfortunate that it
is completely countered by the most
popular Pokémon in the current format.
Rating
Modified: 2.25 (All your neat combos . .
.wrecked by
Darkrai)
Limited: 3.5 (Decent HP, and prevent
players retreating for Prize denial is
very useful)
