#10 Super Potion
Hello and welcome to our countdown of
the top 10 cards from XY. Honestly,
there is so much good stuff in the set
that a lot of deserving cards had to
miss out. I’m pretty sure we will be
covering those later on, though. Coming
in a #10 is a
card which we haven’t seen since the
days of Base Set. Back then Bill Clinton
was the US President and
Spongebob
was waiting to make his TV debut
(thanks, Wikipedia). Yep, it was a long
time ago.
Now we usually exclude reprints from
these top 10 lists, but in this case the
card is a lot different from the
original. True, both are healing cards
(as you would expect from something with
‘Potion’ in its name), but the new Super
Potion is definitely an improvement on a
card that was almost never used when it
first appeared. The old version stated
that you had to first discard
an Energy,
then you could remove four damage
counters from your Pokémon. The XY
reprint’s text says heal
60 damage from your Pokémon, and if
you do so discard an
Energy. The first thing to notice
is the extra healing power, but the
wording is important too: basically it
means that if you have no Energy on your
Pokémon, you can still use Super Potion
but without paying the cost.
How useful will Super Potion be? Well,
there’s a lot of competition out there
from regular, Gold, and Max Potions.
Super Potion has advantages and
disadvantages when compared to them:
it’s more effective than regular Potion
but can result in a discard; it does
less that Gold and Max Potion, but
doesn’t take up an ACE SPEC slot and you
don’t lose all your Energy if you have
more than one attached. Whether or not
it sees play will depend on how the
attack maths work
out in the format. If Super Potion can
turn a two-hit KO into one which needs
three attacks, it will be incredibly
useful. If it can’t
then players will stick to Max Potion.
One thing worth noting is that there are
going to be a lot of opening attacks in
the format that hit
for around 50 damage if the
opponent uses Dark Claw or Muscle Band.
Landorus EX,
Thundurus
EX, Yveltal,
and Plasma Kyurem
all fall into this category and will
typically use a fast, cheap attack to
set up KOs for later. Super Potion may
find a niche as an effective answer to
this strategy.
It’s a card that can drift in and out of
playability during a format, but it’s
one that is always worth bearing in mind
when looking for healing options.
Rating
Modified: 3 (solid healing option in the
right circumstances)
Limited: 4.5 (effective Prize denial in
a relatively low damage environment)
