Baby Mario
2010 UK
National
Seniors
Champion |
Kakuna
(XY)
April 1 is a very special day, and
Pojo has given us a very special review. Yes,
after nearly 14 years of CotD,
it’s time to look at our very first
Kakuna!
Actually, I’m not sure a review is even necessary, as it
should be obvious to everyone how broken this card is.
It is truly one of the highlights of the latest set. For
a start, Kakuna is an
evolving Stage 1: this is great because it means you
don’t have to waste valuable space on rubbish cards like
Rare Candy in order to get your Stage 2 into play, and
this leaves you more room to run fantastic cards like
Plume Fossil and Hooligans Jim &
Cas in your deck. Another great thing about
Kakuna is that you evolve it
into Beedrill XY: a card
that can do 120 damage for
just two Energy and make itself completely immune to any
attack! How could it possibly lose?
But that’s not all. This Kakuna
also has Harden, the iconic attack as seen in the video
games. For the insignificant cost of one Grass Energy
(remember, you can use Virizion
EX’s Emerald Slash for acceleration),
Kakuna will prevent any
attack damage next turn if that damage is 60 or less.
What makes that so special? The fact that
Kakuna has 70 HP of course!
When you use Harden, you are
forcing your
opponent to knock out Kakuna
in one hit, which would totally disrupt any plans they
might have to KO it very slowly over a number of turns.
The more I think about, the more I wonder if you really
need Beedrill at all. This
Kakuna seems destined to
dominate the format until it gets rotated out.
Rating
Modified: 5 (better than Darkrai,
Rayquaza, and
Mewtwo combined)
Limited: 5 (if your opponent pulls one of these bad
boys, just scoop)
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HEZ
Intro to
Unlimited 150 |
Kakuna.
Unlimited 150 review.
An unexpected powerhouse from the XY expansion, with the
right support this Kakuna is indestructible! For just
one Energy it can reduce damage to itself but a mighty
60, combine with Hard Charm to make that -80 and it’s
becoming almost impossible to 1 hit KO! Now combine with
Virbank City Gym and Hypnotoxic Laser and it can Toxic
stall any Pokémon to a KO!
Ok, that’s enough April fooling around… it’s a Kakuna.
Beedrill is actually a top-tier deck in this format but
you really don’t play it for the Kakuna cards. There’s
other versions that search for Evolutions and put them
into play or into hand that you’d probably be better off
playing to support the deck's rapid swarming theme. But,
this one is pretty good at stalling until you can get
your Beedrill into play and it’s one of the better
Kakuna without an Evolution searching attack. Just don’t
expect it to win any games by itself.
Rating: 3 (As far as Kakuna go it is one of the
better ones, Rating is 0 in a deck without Beedrill!)
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