|
Hydreigon
(Plasma Freeze)
Hydreigon
is the ‘overpowered Dragon thing that utterly sweeps
through everything’ when you’re playing the Black and
White video games (just like
Garchomp, Salamence
and Dragonite before it). As
such it has plenty of fans who were delighted to see it
become a competitive card in the shape of
Hydreigon DRX.
Unfortunately, that card has been seeing less and less
competitive play recently: can this new version restore
its fortunes?
Well, it does have a few things it its favour. Dark
Typing means Dark Claw and Dark Patch support. Being
Plasma is also potentially good (Plasma Ball,
Deoxys-EX, etc). The 150 HP
is very nice indeed and means it will be somewhat
difficult (though by no means impossible) to knock out
Hydreigon with a single
attack. I wouldn’t be over worried about the Fighting
Weakness, or overjoyed by the Psychic Resistance. I
would probably moan a bit about the retreat cost, but
hey . . . that can be worked with if necessary.
But it will only be necessary if
Hydreigon can offer us something worthy of the
bother of getting a Stage 2 into play. Unfortunately,
both its attacks are expensive:
Tractorbeam costs one Dark and
two Colourless Energy and
switches the Defending Pokémon with a Benched Pokémon
before doing 40 damage. Yes, it’s a Catcher-like effect,
but the damage output is poor and there may even be
times when you would
prefer to
hit the original active Pokémon. It’s a neat disruptive
attack, but definitely not worthy of a Stage 2, and
neither is the second attack, Obsidian Fang. This adds
another Colourless to the cost and does
80 damage while also discarding Tool
cards attached to the Defending Pokémon. The
discard can be fairly useful in certain situations but
it in no way makes up for the lack of damage output:
when you can’t score unboosted
two-hit KOs on EX Pokémon, you will find that any Prize
trade advantage you would get from playing non-EXs
quickly vanishes.
Hydreigon
gets props for not being completely vanilla, but even
with the neat effects it’s still very underpowered in
this format.
Rating
Modified: 2 (asks for too much and delivers too little)
Limited: 3 (If you can actually get it out, it will
probably do ok)
|
