Baby Mario
2010 UK
National
Seniors
Champion |
Butterfree
I definitely have a soft spot for this Pokémon, seeing
as he featured in the most moving and emotional episode
of the anime ever (‘Bye Bye
Butterfree’). We haven’t seen him in the TCG for
a while now, so let’s hope his comeback is a good one.
You can’t really talk about
Butterfree without mentioning his pre-evolutions
and their Adaptive Evolution Ability which means that
they can evolve on the turn they are put into play
(including the first turn). Put simply, if you have the
whole evolution line in hand, you can go from
Caterpie to
Butterfree in one turn . . .
even on turn one. It’s like having a built-in Broken
Time-Space. Now this is obviously amazing . . . imagine
if you could do it with Empoleon
or Delphox . . . but
unsurprisingly, it is balanced by the fact that
Butterfree is a pretty
terrible card. Quiver Dance may allow him to accelerate
some Energy and
heal himself, but what is the pay off?
Gust, which does 70 points of
utterly vanilla damage. Even if
Butterfree was a Basic, he
would be virtually unusable.
So, is there any hope for him at all? Well, there is the
combination with Miltank
FLF. A first turn Butterfree
can also mean a first turn Miltank
hitting for 80 damage (or
more if you have Muscle Band or Silver Bangle). The deck
obviously has a pretty serious damage cap and no real
secondary attacker to speak of, but
it’s fun and fast enough to deserve some play,
even if it’s only at a casual or league level.
Rating
Modified: 2.5 (the card itself is rubbish, but
Miltank and the pre-evos
make it into something half-decent)
Limited: 2.75 (your biggest problem is pulling enough of
the right cards)
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HEZ
Intro to
Unlimited 150 |
Butterfree.
Unlimited 150 review.
Other than having more HP than any other Butterfree
ever, there’s not really anything spectacular about this
card in U150. In Standard, its rapidly evolving lower
stages make it somewhat interesting to aid Miltank but
you could play better Stage 2s in either format.
Butterfree has never been as lucky in the TCG as its
Generation 1 partner bug, Beedrill. This card is the
same, it doesn’t really do much. Using an attack for
Quiver Dance would be good on a Basic but not a Stage 2.
Once you have got 3 energy on it you still only get 70
damage for your trouble.
Rating: 2 (Unimpressive card in a poorly supported
evolution line.)
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