If you’re reading this, then I forgot to
write an actual intro.
As I wish to be brief (by my standards,
anyway) I’ll forgo most of my usual
formatting.
Town Map is an Item, so unless
you’re totally new to the game I would
mostly just be telling you what you
know: Items are one of the three major
branches of Trainers.
Even the simple effects they have
are often potent, since you can play as
many Items per turn as you wish
(provided you have them in hand and they
would have an effect).
Unsurprisingly few beneficial effects
target Items (at least that are Modified
legal), and the only two worth
mentioning are the new Supporter
Skyla (which simply allows you to
search your deck for a Trainer and add
it to your hand) and Junk Hunt, an
attack for (C) on
Sableye (BW: Dark Explorers
62/108) that allows you to add two Items
from your discard pile to your hand.
A few (again, Modified legal)
effects can hurt Item usage as well, but
none are doing well regularly enough to
be a major concern.
The effect of
Town Map is quite simple; you flip
your Prizes face up, and the text even
states clearly they remain face-up the
rest of the game.
Knowing your Prizes, and
especially knowing exactly which Prize
is in which Prize “spot” is very useful.
Exactly how depends upon how good
of a player you are, but at the very
least the only reason for you not to
take the best Prize each time is because
you misread the circumstances.
In some ways,
Town turns your Prizes into an
auxiliary hand.
Let me emphasize “some ways”;
even under the best circumstances it
clearly is not the same thing.
This is a format of mostly OHKOs
and 2HKOs, so you should never be too
far from having access to one Prize, and
often two (due to combos or simply
taking down a Pokémon-EX).
Unlike your real hand, your
opponent can’t directly mess with your
Prizes without some very specialized
cards (none are Modified legal).
Before I get to the drawbacks, let me
state that learning your Prizes should
rarely be part of the benefits of this
card, at least if you’re a high level
player.
Knowing your deck is a
fundamental skill if you wish to make it
far in Pokémon, and thanks to frequently
used search cards a serious player
should at least have a general idea of
what is Prized after having used a
search effect.
The best of course do know
exactly what their Prizes are.
Now for the two major drawbacks of the
card; your opponent has access to this
information as well, and most other
effects that work with Prize cards
(again, none Modified legal) require
they be facedown.
The former is why I would only
play
Town Map immediately before you take
a Prize; you don’t want to tip your
opponent off that three of your four
Pokémon Catcher are in your Prizes
until you’re taking one of them, for
example.
You may even want to hold out
until you really need to hit a key Prize
(the preceding example would again
qualify).
What hurts this card most isn’t a
drawback, but a simple fact; deck space
is tight!
This card grants a potentially
lifesaving advantage but there are times
when it won’t be needed.
We had a similar effect in
Alph Lithograph FOUR, and that card
didn’t see serious play.
So why did this card make the top
10?
You only need the effect once, so
that is just one slot, and we just got
Skyla, so running a single copy
isn’t failed TecH.
As long as your deck runs
Skyla (preferably three or four),
you’ll be able to spare one should you
realize something important is in your
Prizes and you’ve got to make sure you
get it.
I wish I could say I’ve been
testing this, but for various reasons I
haven’t yet; I just know that the
frequency of games that have been close
(or lost) due to something critical
being stuck in my Prizes means I would
expect it to happen at least once a
tournament, with the knowledge being
help much more often than that.
Unlimited has had access to this kind of
effect for some time, though not in this
exact manner.
It still does, and to better
versions of it, so no need to play it
here.
In Limited, this is very valuable
and you’ll almost always have room and
it is quite common for something “good”
to be stuck in your Prizes.
Ratings
Unlimited:
1/5
Modified:
3.25/5
Limited:
5/5
Summary
For a lot of us,
this is going to be the “61st”
card, that one that just barely misses
being run.
It is a good card easy to work
into any deck, but requiring
Skyla to work well and crowded out
of most decks by other great cards.
I actually had this as my number
six pick, but probably should have had
it in the number eight slot, barely
beating my number nine and ten picks
because they weren’t general usage
cards.
