#5 Pal Pad
Hello and welcome to the second part of
our countdown of the top 10 cards from
Flashfire.
Kicking off the week is a card that I
like maybe a little bit more than I
should (which is why it’s #5 on our
list).
The Pokémon card designers continue with
their reluctance to give us some nice,
splashable,
non-Supporter draw, so frankly anything
that makes Supporters a bit less clumsy
and space-consuming is something I
really welcome. Pal Pad fits right into
that category: it’s an Item that allows
you to retrieve two Supporters from your
discard pile and shuffle them into your
deck. It’s probably worth noting that it
doesn’t say ‘up to 2’. If you have two
(or more) Supporters in the discard then
you can’t just cherry pick a single
Juniper or Lysandre.
On the other hand, if you only have one,
then you can still use Pal Pad under the
‘do as much as you can’ rule.
Pal Pad isn’t good early game, and it
probably won’t allow players to reduce
their count of draw Supporters too much,
as they need them in hand right from the
start. Where it shines is in the late
game, where you can recover a couple of
Junipers as a hedge against N. It also
works well with Random Receiver,
increasing your chances of hitting what
you want. The card helps players who run
‘tech’ non-draw Supporters such as
Lysandre,
Cassius, or Iris: decks are unlikely to
have more than a copy or two of those
cards, so the ability to recycle them if
necessary is fantastic. Finally, Pal Pad
is a godsend in those situations where
you are forced to discard a bunch of
Supporters early (the dreaded ‘triple
Juniper’ hands which we all get from
time to time).
Apart from Dowsing Machine (your one-off
ACE SPEC), Pal Pad is the only practical
way of getting your Supporters back (no,
Simipour XY
is not practical). As such it fulfils a
very useful niche role in the TCG and
may well contribute somewhat to making
decks more stable and consistent.
Rating
Modified: 3.5 (we needed something like
this for a long time)
Limited: 4 (you most likely won’t have
many Supporters, so being able to re-use
them is amazing)
