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Celebi-EX
(Boundaries Crossed)
Remember Celebi Prime? (Come
on, it was only last format!). When that card was
released players (including me) thought . . . ugh. The
HP was tiny, the Power all but useless, and the attack a
tragic waste of space. What we couldn’t know then was
that Pokémon released over a year later would turn the
most rubbish of all the Primes into the engine of a top
notch deck.
Maybe that’s exactly what will happen with
Celebi-EX. There is
certainly a lot to dislike about it as a TCG card. The
110 HP is abysmally low for an EX Pokémon: one
Darkrai-EX with Dark Claw
attached and it’s a OHKO. The
attack is pretty average (three Energy for 60 and a
switch to the Bench), and while the Fire Weakness is
irrelevant right now, and the Water Resistance even
useful, there’s no getting around the fact that
Celebi-EX gives away Prizes
while it really struggles to take them. So, where is the
potential in this card? It must be the Time Recall
Ability. This states that, while
Celebi-EX is in play, any of your evolved Pokémon
can use the attacks of their pre-evolutions. Right away
you can see that Celebi-EX
(like the Prime) is only ever going to be as good as the
pre-evos it has to work
with.
What does that mean right now?
Ummmm
. . . not a lot. You could use it in a
Flygon BCR spread deck to
gain access to Vibrava’s
useful Sand Pulse attack. If you really wanted to, you
could pair it with Charizard
BCR and use Charmeleon’s
Rage-style attack that increases damage for each damage
counter on the Pokémon, or even
Charmander’s Energy acceleration attack. You know
what though? I don’t think Celebi-EX
does enough in either of those decks to justify the huge
liability of a bench-sitting, low HP EX Pokémon.
So . . . for now I’m prepared to write off
Celebi as being mostly
useless. This time though, I’ll keep a look out for
later releases that could unlock its potential. As
Celebi Prime showed us, you
never know what the future might bring.
Rating
Modified: 2 (I haven’t opened many BCR packs, but when I
do, I pull Celebi-EX)
Limited: 2 (Very few ways to exploit t
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