aroramage |
Man, the last time a Crawdaunt was
seen swimming in these waters was back with Legends
Awakened in 2008. I guess that just comes with having
over 700 Pokemon in your arsenal. In any case, it's good
to have him back again! Of Gen III's Pokemon, he's
always been somewhat iconic, whether it be for Ash's
Corphish in the anime to having a sweet design to just
being Gen III's Kingler - which you may recall that Ash
ALSO had one in the anime.
But enough about that, LET'S GET TO
SOME AMAZING-oh. There's...uh, there doesn't appear to
be a "-EX" at the end of that name...ohhhhh nooooo, this
isn't gonna be good is it?
Well given the 90 HP and the
vanilla 3-for-60 Crabhammer, it definitely doesn't look
that way. Honestly, Crawdaunt's only saving grace this
time around is his Ability, Unruly Claw. Like many other
Evolution Abilities (as I like to think of them), when
you evolve a Corphish into Crawdaunt, you get to have
something happen - namely discard any Energy attached to
your opponent's Active Pokemon. That's pretty good, to
be honest, since it's not specifying Basic Energy, so
you can detach DCE, Rainbow, Strong Energy, and so on
and so forth. I could see him potentially getting tech'd
as yet another crippler of Energies with Garbotoad - as
if Head Ringer wouldn't be enough.
But let's count those
disadvantages, shall we?
1) Stage 1 with only 90 HP
2) Vanilla Attack - just...vanilla attack!
3) Activates upon evolution - meaning it only happens
once
...sadly, this is no awakened
legend. Suppose we'll have to wait a little longer for a
great Crawdaunt.
Rating
Standard: 2/5 (one decent Ability
does not a good Pokemon make; you'd think they'd have
learned that from the video games)
Expanded: 2/5 (not even that much
better)
Limited: 3/5 (losing an Energy here
can be crippling, but MAN, that low HP and bad BAD
attack)
Arora Notealus: Crawdaunt's not
just an awesome Kingler-clone - he's an awesome Pokemon
too! He's a brutish ruffian that's difficult to train,
according to the Dex entries...kinda defeated by the
fact that Pokemon Amie shows otherwise. Regardless, he's
a tough dude that's basically the equivalent to Ash's
Charizard...hm...I wonder how hard it would be to
program those kinds of emotions onto Pokemon and vary
them up in personality a bit. I mean, Dragon Warrior
Monsters way back in the day managed to do it. AND NO,
NATURE DOES NOT COUNT
Next Time: So I heard you like
meditating.
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Otaku |
Today we look at Crawdaunt (XY: Primal Clash 92/160).
We’ll dive right in due to time constraints that... are
my own fault. So this is a Darkness-Type and as
mentioned earlier this week, a few years ago it was the
best Type to be but a lot of its support has not only
rotated out, but became obsolete or at least diminished
so that even in Expanded, it is just a very good Type
due to Dark Patch: in Standard its a good Type
but not as good as if the card had been the Water-Type.
It might seem like a nitpick, but later on I’ll show
you how this card might have been even better if it had
been Dive Ball compliant. It is a Stage 1, so it
is slower than a Basic but much easier to use than a
Stage 2; I’ll again take the optimistic outlook that
this is at worst a mild obstacle (though at best being a
Stage 1 is now “neutral” with being a Basic as an
advantage and being a Stage 2 as a disadvantage).
Crawdaunt has 90 HP, making
it probable OHKO unless you’re opponent’s set-up is
incomplete (foreshadowing!). This isn’t a great score
but if this is a bench-sitter (hint hint!) it’ll do,
plus this means in Expanded one could use Level Ball
to fetch it from the deck. The Fighting Weakness all
but guarantees a Fighting-Type will score a OHKO against
it; most that see play can do 20 or 30 for [F], so once
you add in a Muscle Band or Strong Energy
(both for the slightly weaker attacks), Crawdaunt
is a gonner thanks to the Weakness. I want to
emphasize, if the attack can do damage, Muscle Band
plus Strong Energy will get it to OHKO range
unless Weakness can be neutralized. Crawdaunt
does get to enjoy some Resistance, which is nice; -20 to
the damage done by Psychic-Types may not make a huge
difference but it is (for example) another Energy or the
presence of Muscle Band for Mewtwo-EX to
score the OHKO with X-Ball. The Retreat Cost of [CC]
is… okay. It is high enough you won’t want to pay it
but low enough that it is still just a Double
Colorless Energy away from retreating; fortunately
most decks are likely to pack something to lower the
cost or bypass manually retreating entirely.
Crawdaunt enjoys and
Ability alongside one attack. The Ability is Unruly
Claw; when you Evolve one of your in play Pokémon into
Crawdaunt, you may discard an Energy attached to
your opponent’s Active Pokémon: in short this is the
Ability version of Team Flare Grunt. The card’s
lone attack is Crabhammer for [DCC], hitting for 60
damage. There isn’t a huge amount of synergy between
the two other than how discarding an Energy on what
you’re attacking might help buy time to build/keep your
current Active alive an extra turn. Unruly Claw has its
uses, but in most (but not all) decks you are likely to
be trying to OHKO or 2HKO the opponent’s Active, which
makes discarding Energy from it unnecessary about half
the time. Throw in the number of low Energy attackers
and the many other methods of discarding Energy and all
in all, the Ability is decent: far better than nothing,
but not something that makes me want to run the card…
and yet Crabhammer is badly overpriced or underpowered;
it isn’t totally worthless as at least with a Silver
Bangle you can try to 2HKO a Pokémon-EX with 180 HP
or less (or Darkness Weakness) but since Crawdaunt
isn’t likely to survive being Active for a turn, you’ll
need something else (even another Crawdaunt with
the Energy and the Silver Bangle) to start or
finish the deal.
There is currently only one Corphish available: XY:
Primal Clash 42/160 and it is a Basic, Water-Type
with 60 HP, Grass Weakness, no Resistance, Retreat Cost
[C], no Ability, no Ancient Trait and two attacks. For
[C] it can use Vice Grip for 10 and for [CC] it can use
Knock Off to discard a random card from your opponent’s
hand. While not a great foundation, it actually has
some things going for it. I mentioned earlier I wanted
Crawdaunt to be a Water-Type and… it wasn’t just
to combo with Corphish, but we’ll get to why in
the next paragraph. That vanilla 10 means at least it
can do damage (while usually not useful, it is still
better than nothing) but Knock Off actually has a small
chance of keeping Corphish alive to Evolve if you
can nail a card key to your opponent attacking next
turn. Again, this is a very small chance, but we are in
a strange format where even though everything is fast
and should be reliable, there are a lot of cards that
can be “dead for the moment” where you have a hand full
of the top cards in the game… but not quite what you
needed to be able to attack. Again this isn’t great or
anything; like almost all Evolving Basic Pokémon,
Corphish is a long ways away from where I think it
ought to be, but that is a subject for another time.
So if you weren’t already well aware of what I’ve been hinting at,
this card I thought would be pretty terrible when I
first saw it has one confirmed use; another dance
partner for Seismitoad-EX. Seismitoad-EX/Crawdaunt
decks managed to make it to the Top 8 four times during
State Championships, with two second place and two sixth
place finishes at four separate tournaments. Though it
shows how I still can flub up evaluating cards, had we
reviewed this sooner I’d have dismissed it as an
obviously inferior option to the other Seismitoad-EX
variants. Head to head it still might be but I lack the
information to know for sure. What I do understand now
is that Unruly Claw, like some other coming-into-play
Abilities can be spammed mercilessly and that the method
of doing so - Super Scoop Up - just so happens to
double as amazing healing for Pokémon-EX. This is
plenty annoying when you’ve got something like
Landorus-EX or Mewtwo-EX, bouncing back to
hand while something that can get out of the way gets
promoted, then being dropped back to the Bench with the
single Energy attachment they need to start swinging
away again. With Seismitoad-EX it is extra
painful as Item lock is likely leaving you with little
to do but try and peck away at its HP.
Now… why is discarding a single Energy worth it? Seismitoad-EX
decks aren’t often able to score 2HKOs, so instead of an
entire Stage line discarding an Energy that might only
stop one attack it might be stopping two or three, plus
Seismitoad-EX also likes to run Head Ringer,
forcing the opponent’s Pokémon-EX (well, at least the
ones you can equip Head Ringer to and keep it on)
to pay an extra [C] to attack. So something that
normally attacks for just one Energy will have to pay
two, and that means constantly discarding from it may
prevent it from attacking at all! This isn’t a tactic
unique to this Seismitoad-EX build; others just
do it less or use Items (Crushing Hammer,
Enhanced Hammer) or Team Flare Grunt. This
deck has the mixed blessing of only losing this one
trick when Abilities go down and if Abilities aren’t
being shut off, it can discard Energy against an
opponent that is blocking Items or Supporters. Its
synergy with Seismitoad-EX is why I no longer
lament Crawdaunt missing out on Dive Ball
and having a clearly nerfed attack.
For Expanded, I think Level Ball and the wider range of
Special Energy cards makes this a little more effective.
Yes, it works on any Energy that is attached to
the opponent’s Active, but Special Energy are harder to
replace and generally only used because they make a deck
work so much better… so if you’re discarding one it
usually hurts a lot worse than taking out a basic Energy
card. Level Ball may not work on Seismitoad-EX,
but it can snag Jirachi-EX (a useful card in many
decks) plus Corphish and Crawdaunt itself.
For Limited play, only skip Crawdaunt if you
can’t pull a single Corphish or if you are
running a +39 built; you can run it solely for the
Ability or run it as a decent filler attacker with a
useful, one-shot Ability. A weird tangent I want to
point out; ignoring cards like Seismitoad-EX
(because I think any big, Basic Pokémon that can hit for
damage T2 is a problem, let alone a Pokémon-EX that can
Item lock) Crawdaunt gives us an idea of what I
think transitional Pokémon (those Basic and Stage 1
Pokémon that can Evolve) should try to be. Of
course Crawdaunt does not Evolve, but an
Unruly Claw Ability would be nice on a Charmeleon
(for example). Again though there are a lot of cards
that would make that a bad idea at the moment,
like Seismitoad-EX.
Ratings
Standard: 3/5
Expanded: 3.25/5
Limited: 4.8/5
Summary: While a bit more in depth than I expected, Crawdaunt turned
out to be a card worth having if you plan on running
Seismitoad-EX. Most of what I believe goes into a
Crawdaunt backed Seismitoad-EX build works
in other Seismitoad-EX decks, so even if you
prefer a different variant, it would be wise to have
this on hand, whether because you change your mind at
the last minute or (at a two day event) because you
suspect based on Day 1 that it would be the better play.
At the same time, it is important to note that on its
own… it just isn’t that great of a card; without a
control deck it probably would make more sense focusing
on upping your damage or improving your own set-up. It
also is metagame sensitive; it might become the top
Seismitoad-EX variant, stay steady or fall off
depending on what all gets released.
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