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At last it is
Friday! It
also happens to be George Washington’s birthday; he was
quite influential to the founding of the United States of America
and if you’ve never bothered learning about him, I
recommend it.
It is also my younger sister’s birthday.
Happy birthday Jennie!
…
I suppose I should
actually get to the topic at hand; our final runner-up
for the Top 10 Promising Picks of Plasma Storm is
Plasma Frigate
(BW: Plasma Storm 124/135)!
Stats
You can only play
one Stadium per turn and you can’t play down a copy of
one already in play, making this the most difficult to
play of the three core Trainer subdivisions (Item,
Supporter, and Stadium).
Stadiums stick around until discarded.
This means gives
Plasma Stadium
at least one default use in any format where Stadiums
are important, as they can discard a different Stadium
even if their own effect isn’t that useful.
Playing another
Stadium is the only way to discard another Stadium card
in Modified to my knowledge; in the past we have had
Pokémon and even an Items (though it was not known as an
Item at the time) to do this.
For the record, this is how Stadiums should be;
my time with other games has confirmed that if such
cards are too easy to discard, they tend to become
useless.
This is a Team
Plasma affiliated card, but it can currently make use of
very little of the Team Plasma Support.
This will change in the future, but for now it’s
barely worth mentioning.
Most of the actual Team Plasma cards don’t affect
it nor does it have any specific effects restricted to
them.
Effects
While
Plasma Frigate is in play, Pokémon with a
Plasma Energy card don’t have Weakness applied when they are damaged
by an attack.
Like all Stadiums, this effect applies equally to
both players, but it will be hard to take advantage of
without a deck being built around it.
Perhaps a bit too
hard; you can only have four copies of
Plasma Energy
in your deck, so even if you can get them out, attached,
and keep them in place, you’ll only be able to protect
four total Pokémon at once.
In fact, even over the course of the game,
without resorting to
Recycle and/or
Scramble Switch
you can’t protect more than four.
The effect isn’t
going to always matter; all currently legal cards only
have one form of Weakness and if you aren’t facing it,
you won’t need protection from it.
If you have a Weakness to a seldom (successfully)
played Type like Grass, you shouldn’t really worry about
it. Only if
it is commonly played and the Weakness damage is going
to matter should you consider it.
Usage
Plasma Energy
is required for the effect, but
Plasma Frigate
doesn’t care if it is a Team Plasma Pokémon.
You can indirectly tap
Colress Machine as added support if you are wanting to protect a
Team Plasma Pokémon; otherwise only
Team Plasma Grunt
can directly make use of it for being a Team Plasma
card, and you’ll notice I haven’t been recommending that
Supporter even though I keep bringing it up.
In Unlimited,
unless things have greatly improved most decks that
dominate aren’t worrying about Weakness; they win or at
least lock you down first turn without heavy emphasis or
even any attack that does damage.
There are other options here as well, but there
might be a few decks that can at least consider using it
because the Stadium slot might be the least important
for them.
Granted, you’ll probably need something like
Slowking (Neo
Genesis 14/111) to both protect your
Plasma Energy
and Plasma Frigate
itself.
In Modified, it
really doesn’t seem likely to help.
Your deck has to constantly be running afoul of
Weakness, and not just as the odd off-Type attacker in
decks but as a fairly consistent thing, in addition to
having room for
Plasma Frigate and
Plasma Energy.
There is some benefit in that several decks are
cutting whatever they can, including
Crushing Hammer
and Enhanced
Hammer to make room for
Hypnotoxic Laser
and Virbank City
Gym; this reduces the chance of your opponent
voiding the effect via discarding
Plasma Energy, and while it provides most deck with a Stadium to
knock out Plasma
Frigate, in turn
Plasma Frigate
becomes useful in general for ditching
Virbank City Gym.
In Limited I highly
recommend it, but only because I fear
Virbank City Gym
and usually you have a filler Pokémon or spare basic
Energy you can cut for it.
If you actually have
Plasma Energy
to use with it: great.
Odds are against it really mattering, but Limited
decks usually have room for this sort of thing.
Ratings
Unlimited:
1.5/5
Modified:
2.5/5
Limited:
5/5
Summary
Plasma Frigate
will struggle to see play due to the incomplete nature
of our Team Plasma card pool, the crowded nature of
decks, and the raw power of offense in the current
metagame. If
a deck can already make good use if
Plasma Energy
and also keeps it in play (and the Pokémon it is
attached to) long enough to matter, you still might use
this card; this could be the “back-up” Stadium for some
decks. Yes,
in formats where Stadiums are important but too many
copies of the same one redundant, it can be well worth
running a split on your Stadiums!
Plasma Frigate
clocked in as my number 14 pick for my extended
Promising Picks of Plasma Storm list.
It may still be worth that position, but that
speaks more to the state of the format and potential of
the remaining cards than to the prospects of
Plasma Frigate
seeing heavy play.
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