Baby Mario
2010 UK
National
Seniors
Champion |
Krookodile
(Plasma Freeze)
I get the feeling that Krookodile
is one of those Pokémon that people really
want to be
good yet, despite getting some interesting
cards, he never really makes
the grade. A lot of that is down to the fact that he is
a Stage 2 Pokémon in a format where a Stage 2 has to be
really special to be worth the deck space and resources
it demands.
This Krookodile is a Dark
Type, so there is some support available via Dark Patch
and Dark Claw, for Energy acceleration and damage
boosting respectively. The 140 HP is decent, but hardly
infallible protection from OHKOs with
Hypnotoxic Laser and
Deoxys-EX around, but at
least the Fighting Weakness isn’t quite as bad as it has
been in the recent past. Psychic Resistance won’t come
into play much, but it’s better than nothing, while the
retreat cost of three mandates the inclusion of
switching Trainers in your deck.
When it comes to attacks,
Krookodile has a couple of options. The first,
Piston Headbutt, is
competitively priced at one Dark Energy and for that you
get 30 damage and an effect which allows you to move
an Energy from the Defending
Pokémon to a Benched Pokémon. Unfortunately, this is
mandatory so it could end up
helping an
opponent if you use Piston Headbutt
to knock something out. Most of the time though, it is a
cute little disruptive effect that can set an opponent
back a bit more than you would think by shifting the
Energy to a non-attacker like, say,
Blastoise or Garbodor.
However, this kind of low damage trickery is not what
you would play an offensive Stage 2 for. Really, they
would need a huge cheap attack to be even worth
considering.
Unfortunately, Krookodile
doesn’t have anything of the kind. All it has to offer
besides Piston Headbutt is
Hammer In: an attack which does 80 points of vanilla
damage for three Energy.
That’s not even a two-hit KO on an EX without some kind
of assistance, and that just isn’t good enough. Despite
the fact that I quite like the first attack, there is
nothing on this card to be worth making room for.
It’s binder only, I’m afraid.
Rating
Modified: 2 (even some of the other
Krookodiles are better than this)
Limited: 2.5 (not the worst Stage 2, but it doesn’t
really repay the difficulty of getting it on the Field)
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