Gardevoir
(Legendary Treasures)
We end the week with a look at the
Radiant Collection
Gardevoir from Legendary
Treasures. She’s pretty much the obvious
Pokémon to use for a pink and
prettyful
set, so it’s no surprise to see her
here. Despite being a Stage 2 with
relatively low HP,
Gardevoir is actually one of the
better new cards that we received in the
set. Of course, that says a lot more
about the new cards in Legendary
Treasures than it does about the
playability of
Gardevoir.
What she does have in her favour are two
fairly cheap and interesting attacks.
Ok, so maybe
Psybeam isn’t all
that interesting: 40 damage and
Confusion for two Energy isn’t
especially attractive as Confusion has
been no more than a minor annoyance for
many years now, ever since Pokémon
changed the rule so that you could
simply retreat out of it without the
need for a coin flip.
Eternal Radiance, on the other hand,
does seem to offer possibilities.
For two Psychic
Energy you get to move all damage
counters from
Gardevoir to the Defending
Pokémon. The downside of this is that it
can’t be used on consecutive turns so
you will need
Keldeo EX’s Rush
In Ability,
plus Float Stone, to re-set
Gardevoir
and enable her to just slough off the
damage she takes turn after turn. This
seems like a very attractive combo, and
it would be if it wasn’t so easy for
most decks to just OHKO
Gardevoir
and make Eternal Radiance an
irrelevance.
Blastoise decks can OHKO
Gardevoir
for fun; so can
Kyurem PLF.
Lugia EX does it and takes an
extra Prize, while
Darkrai EX only needs help from
Hypnotoxic
Laser and Virbank
City Gym to get the job done. Even less
common decks like
Trubbish Toolbox,
Emboar/Rayquaza
EX, Flareon
PLF and anything with
Mewtwo EX in
it will just laugh at poor
Gardy.
In a different format, she could have
been almost
too good: like a self-sustaining
version of the
Gothitelle/Reuniclus
healing decks we saw a few years ago.
Right now though, there’s no real way
that this Gardevoir
can stand up to all the big hitters out
there.
Rating
Modified: 2 (how ironic that an attack
with ‘eternal’ in its name can’t be used
all the time)
Limited: 3.75 (fewer threats here, so if
you can set up a
Gardy, she’ll likely do well)
