aroramage |
SKYLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA :D
...what? She's my favorite!
And no, that's NOT because she ended up at #2 on the Top
10 List for Boundaries Crossed, #4 for Top 10 Cards of
2012, and #9 for Top 10 Cards Lost to Rotation.
...but she did get all of those.
Skyla is a versatile Supporter that saw a lot of play
back in her day all the way up to her getting rotated
out...for a few weeks until she got reprinted in this
set. It should come as no surprise that a Trainer card
that can fetch other Trainer cards got to be played in
just about every deck - she's just as much a staple as
Lysandre or Sycamore!
So strap yourselves in for a high-flying ride, cause
Skyla here is back, baby! :D
...note to self: get the Full Art version...
Rating
Standard: 4/5 (always a useful Supporter, and a great
addition to any deck!)
Expanded: 4/5 (the more the merrier!)
Limited: 5/5 (YES, YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES!!)
Arora Notealus: *hugs Skyla* ^.^
Weekend Thought: How was this
week's cards for ya? Yeah? Great? No? I dunno, I haven't
been paying much attention save for a couple of cards.
Good ol' work weeks, am I right? :D OH WELL, NEXT WEEK
OUGHTA BE EXCITING :DDD
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Otaku |
We end the week with the return of Skyla (BW:
Boundaries Crossed 134/149, 149/149; XY:
BREAKthrough 148/162)! Skyla was
first reviewed
as our second place pick from BW: Boundaries Crossed,
then again
as our fourth best card of 2012 and the
last time
we saw her it was to bid her farewell as the ninth best
card lost to Standard play as it shifted to XY-On.
So what made Skyla so good and does it still
apply?
Skyla
is our third and final Supporter for these last two
weeks; Supporters (excluding the duds) have potent
effects more or less balanced out by a player only being
allowed to play a single Supporter on his or her turn
(and sometimes by an additional drawback). Thanks
to Battle Compressor and VS Seeker
(especially the latter), Supporters easier to utilize
than perhaps ever before and at varying counts: singles,
doubles, triples and full four counts all have seen
successful play. Supporters don’t have to deal
with as potent of locks as Items or even Stadiums at the
moment, so their main competition and reason for
exclusion is to avoid a glut of them in hand.
Regardless they are the main driving force in a deck for
setting up and maintaining your field, give or take a
few useful Abilities like Shaymin-EX (XY:
Roaring Skies 77/108; 106/108). Skyla is no
exception as she allows you to search your deck for a
Trainer (be it Item, Supporter or Stadium) and add it to
your hand.
At the time Skyla released this was pretty
unusual; while past Supporters would grab Trainers they
were usually restricted to a certain kind. Now we
have similar-yet-different cards like Trainer’s Mail
(Item that grabs a single Trainer but only from the top
four cards of your deck) and Korrina (Supporter
that grabs a Fighting-Type Pokémon and one Item).
Most decks already run Ultra Ball, so as long as
you’ve got discard fodder and Items aren’t being locked
down, Skyla can grab any Pokémon or Trainer. Ultra
Ball plus the usual Shaymin-EX means you can
also convert Skyla to draw power in a lot of
situations without any extra inclusions in your deck.
Some decks either already run or could justify running
Professor’s Letter alongside her and that allows
you to snag any Basic Energy as well. In Expanded
you can still use her to grab an Ace Spec when it is
needed, with Computer Search allowing Skyla
to grab any card you want from your deck!
Well, provided you have the discard fodder and Items
aren’t blocked. When Skyla was released,
she joined Professor Juniper and N as the
third of the three main Supporters in decks, and we ran
a lot of Items in varying counts because Skyla
allowed a “toolkit” approach to work.
Skyla
never left Expanded, but she’s not the powerhouse she
once was: why? Of course one rarely uses her to
snag another Supporter as it badly telegraphs what you
are about to do and most decks need something they can
play immediately anyway; if something stays in your hand
most opponent’s can send it away with N.
You can only use a single Stadium per turn plus you
can’t drop another copy of something already in play,
making for another potential card you can search but not
use that turn. Now Items were always the main use
for Skyla anyway, but then comes the Item lock
decks effects that were available before and around the
time Skyla originally released but kept becoming
more and more potent. You draw into Skyla
after GIratina-EX (XY: Ancient Origins
57/98, 93/98) used its “Chaos Wheel” attack while
Vileplume (XY: Ancient Origins 3/98) has
Items blocked with its “Irritating Pollen” Ability and
Skyla is functionally dead. A simple
Seismitoad-EX leaves Skyla only able to snag
another Supporter or a Stadium, and if you run the
Stadium already in play, she’s more useful than an Item
but you really wish she was a Professor Sycamore
or the like. In Expanded we did finally get one
more really good (just not quite great) draw card in the
form of Colress and Skyla was already
slipping from “great” down to “really good” by that
point as well. It didn’t mean we all dropped
Skyla, but suddenly it made sense not to run three
or four copies of her but more like two, with say two
copies of Colress as he was usually awful the
first turn or two of the game.
It isn’t all bad; a copy or two of Skyla can do
wonders while also being surprisingly reliable. Battle
Compressor allows you to chuck Skyla into the
discard while VS Seeker allows you to then use
access her when needed: kind of funny because I
originally thought a clutch Battle Compressor
would be fetched by Skyla so that VS Seeker
could spam other low count Supporters. The thing
is though, that is Expanded… what about
Standard? Skyla returns to a format that may
still face a lot of Item lock but desperately wants
another great Supporter, having lost both Colress
and N. Does Skyla deliver? She
isn’t really comparable to N or Professor
Juniper or Professor Sycamore but she
seems a step above everything else until we get to
specific decks. I already mentioned that you can
go Skyla => Ultra Ball => Shaymin-EX
which allows her to fake being a draw Supporter
reasonably well, so I’m thinking she’ll have a place
here unless we get something better in the next set or
two. In Limited play with either of her
appearances, it depends on whether you pull any other
Trainers; even if they are more Skyla she is
probably worth the space as deck thinning, so go ahead
and use her!
Ratings
Standard:
3.8/5
Expanded:
3.5/5
Limited:
5/5
Summary:
Skyla is still a very good card but thanks to
Item lock and crowded deck lists I don’t know if she
remains a great card, but in Standard she’ll come at
least close. I hope I am underselling her as she
still has the combos to access almost your entire deck,
I just don’t know how many current competitive lists
have the space for those add-ons in addition to Skyla
herself or can take the risk of Items (what she’ll be
snagging most of the time) being locked down. A
most welcome return nonetheless: if reprints weren’t
excluded Skyla would have finished high on our
recent top 10 list for XY: BREAKthrough, if not
topped it!
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