Cofagrigus
(Dark Explorers)
Fun fact (which
isn’t really fun if you think about it):
Cofagrigus’s
Japanese name translates as ‘death
coffin’. Chances of that surviving
translation for a Western audience would
have been exactly zero. Ironically, the
name they chose ended up causing
problems of its own on the Global Trade
Station in the video games, but that’s
another story.
Cofagrigus
is a fully evolved Stage 1 Pokémon with
a mediocre 100 HP, a painful Retreat
cost of two, and a Weakness to Dark
which makes it easy prey for all the
Darkrai-EX
out there. One good thing is that it’s a
Psychic Type that doesn’t have Psychic
Weakness so Mewtwo-EX
will need an extra Energy to OHKO it
with X-Ball. Not that that is likely to
be a problem.
Lock Up,
Cofragrigus’s
second attack, is relatively
uninteresting. For
two Psychic Energy, it does 40
damage and stops the Defending Pokémon
from Retreating next turn. Although
there could be situations where it would
be useful (for example if an opponent
had something like
Vileplume UD active for some
reason), Lock Up is nothing special and
is certainly not the reason why this
card was given a bit of attention when
it was first revealed. To discover why
that was, we have to take a look at
Chuck . .
.
Chuck is a somewhat
original attack, which has the potential
to inflict a great deal of damage. For
the low cost of two
Colourless Energy, you discard as
many Tools as you like from your hand
and get to do 40 damage for each one.
With four Tools currently available (Exp
Share, Eviolite,
Rocky Helmet, Dark Claw), and more to be
released soon, it’s clear that
Cofagrigus
has the ability
in theory to OHKO any Pokémon ever
printed.
There are, however,
a couple of problems. The first is the
massive HP of a lot of Pokémon these
days. If
Cofagrigus
wanted to KO any EX Pokémon (apart from
Mewtwo,
which it hits for Weakness, and
Shaymin), it
would need to discard FIVE Tools.
Even taking an easy KO on most evolving
Basics, or support Pokémon like
Smeargle
would mean losing a couple. Yes, they
can be brought back with Junk Arm, but
even so, even getting that many in your
hand in the first place is difficult.
Doing it three times to take 6 Prizes
from EX Pokémon?
Very unlikely indeed. The second
problem is the effect that running 16
Tools will have on your deck. That is
over a quarter of the space dedicated to
stuff that you are just going to
discard. It means that room for
consistency cards (draw and search) is
squeezed and the chances of drawing into
a terrible hand (imagine opening with
Yamask, Junk
Arm, and five Tools) is far higher than
you would like. So much so, that I think
it is impossible to build a
Cofagrigus
deck that isn’t doomed to having huge
consistency issues.
It’s a neat idea.
It may even be worthy of a fun League
deck. But taking this to a tournament
would be asking for trouble and inviting
failure.
Rating
Modified: 2
(interesting but impractical)
Limited: 2.25 (only
one Tool in the set, so you would be
relying on the mediocre Lock Up attack)
