Greetings, readers!
We start this week with the
weighty topic of the number five card on
our countdown of the top 10 most
promising cards from BW: Next
Destinies, and that card is
Heavy Ball.
It’s time for me to weigh in.
Stats
Heavy Ball
is an Item, a sub-type of Trainers.
This is the most common Trainer
class to be blocked by outside effects,
and that is the only drawback I can
legitimately come up with: Items are the
easiest class of Trainer to play, only
requiring you be able to play out the
effect (or at least believe you may,
given the game state).
As such, small effects often add
up rather quickly in a game like
Pokémon, where draw power plentiful.
While unlikely to return, the “Ball”
Trainers were for a time treated as a
sub-type amongst Items (or rather
“Normal Trainers” as they were then
known).
I can only find one piece of
actual support for them;
Apricorn Maker (Skyridge
121/144) wasn’t especially good but its
existence is encouraging, both with
respect to advancing game mechanics and
maintaining the ambiance of the game.
Effects
Heavy Ball
has a simple effect: search your deck
for a Pokémon with a Retreat Cost of
three or more and add it to your hand.
Referencing Pokémon weight would
have been more faithful to the source
material, and even possible, given that
weight has returned to Pokémon cards,
but knowing where to draw the line might
be a bit awkward (plus weight has been
dropped from cards in the past).
The Retreat Cost is a decent
compromise, as well as allowing some
leeway with card design: while a large
Retreat is still a burden, two versus
three can now be used to better balance
some cards.
I find this restriction on searching
preferable to that of
Level Ball, since this is more
likely to get something big, be it a
Basic Pokémon or a Stage 2, and
generally speaking “large is in charge”:
Pokémon can be fantastic but still have
low HP, but lowering HP is a more
extreme form of compensation than
raising Retreat Cost, and the end result
is that low HP Pokémon are just a little
less likely to be as useful as those
with a larger Retreat Cost.
Lastly I will pass on a ruling:
sadly despite the bottom half having the
Retreat Cost printed on it, you cannot
use
Heavy Ball to snag that portion of a
Pokémon
LEGEND card.
Usage
First, this card is very effective at
torturing a player like me.
Why?
So many of the legal targets for
this card in Modified are ones I had
high hopes for… before the format
shifted to something dominated by Basic
versions of rare/Legendary Pokémon
(Pokémon-EX or not).
Many we saw at the close of the
previous format, where again they were
crowded out by amazingly (I would say
over-) potent cards and mechanics, and
player’s like me looked forward to the
format change allowing them to finally
shine.
They never did get the chance,
though for some not all hope is gone.
Still, let me focus on the
present (and
recent past).
You find some great candidates
for
Heavy Ball:
-
Donphan
(HeartGold/SoulSilver
107/123)
-
Emboar
(Black & White
19/114)
-
Emboar
(Black & White
20/114, BW Promo
BW21, BW: Next
Destinies 100/99)
-
Feraligatr
(HeartGold/SoulSilver
108/123, HGSS Promo
HGSS07)
-
Kyurem EX
(BW: Next Destinies
38/99, 96/99)
-
Magnezone
(HS: Triumphant
96/102)
-
Regigigas EX
(BW: Next Destinies
82/99, 99/99)
-
Reshiram EX
(BW: Next Destinies
22/99, 95/99)
-
Terrakion
(BW: Noble Victories
73/101, 99/101)
-
Zekrom EX
(BW: Next Destinies
51/99, 97/99)
Obviously not a huge list, but not bad.
In fact, as I look I can’t help
but notice it almost looks like it was
designed for three decks: Magneboar (Emboar/Magnezone),
Rain Dance (Feraligatr/Kyurem
EX), and some sort of Fighting deck
that either hasn’t (or perhaps never
will) fully gel.
Indeed there were multiple
Fighting-Type Stage 1 and 2 Pokémon that
I left off the list because they never
succeeded in getting a deck, or I found
the outlook doubtful.
Getting to the point of this line
of reasoning, this may indeed be a sort
of “not technically” theme support:
specific decks were either in mind when
Heavy Ball was designed or cards for
those decks were designed knowing
Heavy Ball was on the way.
I say this because as many like to point
out, there really are valid alternatives
to search for the above Pokémon.
Any Basic Pokémon can easily be
one of the three you’re allowed to snag
with
Pokémon Collector (two most recent
printings are HeartGold/SoulSilver
100/123, Call of Legends 82/95)
may only grab a single card, but instead
of a Basic Pokémon it is the Evolution
of your choice.
Those are of course Supporters,
so obviously there is still an advantage
to using an Item instead, namely saving
your Supporter for something else (like
raw draw power).
Shifting to other Items, you can
go with the reliable
Pokémon Communication (HeartGold/SoulSilver
98/123, Black & White 99/114) but
then you have to already have another
Pokémon you
want to put back into your deck in
your hand.
You can go with the classic
Poké Ball (most recent and
up-to-date printing is Black & White
97/114), but that is seldom a good idea
as searching for a Pokémon is usually
too important to trust to a card that
fails half the time, even if it is an
Item.
Basic Pokémon fair a hair better
since
Dual Ball (two most recent printings
are HS: Unleashed 72/95, Call
of Legends 78/95) works for at least
a single Basic Pokémon with three of its
four possible outcomes, but it still is
coin flip dependent.
All in all, I’d say this creates
a nice niche for
Heavy Ball in Modified.
Unlimited has many, many potent Pokémon
that can be searched out via
Heavy Ball, but this is Unlimited:
the best draw and search cards in the
game are here, and they aren’t even
Supporters!
On top of that, many decks
won’t have something with a three
Energy Retreat Cost even if they are a
more casual deck, and just like in
Modified you wouldn’t use
Heavy Ball unless
multiple (not in terms of copies but
kinds) such Pokémon are in the deck.
In Limited play, you’ve got 24 Pokémon
in this set that have a high enough
Retreat Cost that
Heavy Ball can snag them.
Two of these cards are Secret
Rares
and Evolutions, making it not only
highly unlikely you’d pull them, but
pointless to run unless you are drafting
alongside a set containing their lower
Stages.
Of the rest, only six Common
rarity Pokémon (all Basics as well) and
two Uncommon (both Evolutions whose
Basic forms also qualified) meet the
minimum three Energy Retreat Cost
requirement for
Heavy Ball.
If you are fortunate enough to
have even a single legal target of
Heavy Ball worth running in your
deck, then odds are it is well worth the
possible dead draw to run
Heavy Ball alongside it; it is quite
probable you simply
won’t have a target for it in your
deck list.
Ratings
Unlimited:
2.5/5
Modified:
3.5/5
Limited:
3/5
Summary
For all formats, the usefulness of
Heavy Ball really depends on your
deck.
Unlike its set-mate
Level Ball, for which it is hard to
build a deck that lacks a single legal
target,
Heavy Ball can be completely useless
in a particular deck list, and even when
there is a legal target, only in Limited
will it be acceptable to run it for a
single Pokémon (even with multiple
copies of that Pokémon).
This greatly restricts what decks
should use it, but when you do have a
deck with plentiful targets it is pretty
great.
Please check out my eBay sales by
clicking
here.
It’s me whittling away at about
two decades worth of attempted
collecting, spanning action figures,
comic books, TCGs, and video games.
Exactly what is up is a bit
random.
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