aroramage |
Welcome to a week of promos leading up to the release
of Primal Clash! We figured we'd get our hands on those
Primal cards first before we go ranking them, so for
this week, we're taking a look at some Promo cards!
Today's card is one of three cards that was released
with special blister packs for the Phantom Forces set,
including the promo card itself, a coin, and three
booster packs from the Phantom Forces set. It's Greninja
the Gen VI final of the water starter!
Greninja here is different from his brethren Greninja,
as he wields the Dark Type. This is great in Expanded
with all the Dark support, and he even has attributes
more suited to cards within Expanded! But first, his
attack: Shadow Bullet. For a Darkness and Colorless
Energy, Greninja shoots out of the shadows and hits the
Active Pokemon for 60 and a Bench-sitter for 20. It's
similar to Darkrai-EX's own attack, Night Spear, only
cheaper and weaker, but on a Stage 2 like Greninja here,
it's almost wholly inferior.
I say almost because, as I mentioned before, he has a
particular attribute suited to some cards in Expanded:
the Ability Mist Concealment. When Greninja gets played
from your hand, during your opponent's turn, they can't
TOUCH Greninja! No damage, no attack effects, nothing -
he can't be hit!...well, at least not by any Pokemon. He
can still be hurt by HTLBank, but that's about the worst
he could get - he's in the clear otherwise!
This may prompt the opponent to try and work around
Greninja in some manner during that turn of concealment
- usually with, again, HTL or just by switching Greninja
out with something else. Which is fine, it just takes a
bit more resourcing. That's one of Greninja's handier
tricks - he's either forcing the opponent to do nothing
with their attack or waste resources trying to hit
something. Now if it's a game-ending attack, they'll
wanna go for it, but otherwise it's almost better to
wait Greninja out - and that's when he strikes!
All things considered, he's not bad, and stuff like
Devolution Spray will help trigger his Ability much more
often! Combine that with Sableye DEX's Junk Hunt to
retrieve the Devolution Spray and Rare Candies you may
end up using, and you can constantly throw Greninja down
without worrying about the opponent getting rid of
him!...though if he could just beat the opponent a
little faster.
Rating
Standard: 1.5/5 (as much as one benefits from Greninja's
Ability, most of the stuff to make the gimmick work is
over in Expanded; here, he's outclassed by Darkrai-EX
easily for attacking and Ability)
Expanded: 2.5/5 (a nice Ability to make a gimmicky deck
around, but certainly no high-level playing card; still,
much more support here than in Standard)
Limited: N/A (oh yeah...promos...no sets...)
Arora Notealus: Truly, he is the best ninja frog of our
time. Mist Concealment's really cool, and I like that
the designers worked on putting the ninja aspect of "Greninja"
into his card.
Next Time: From the void in your dreams, the shadow
rises.
|
Otaku |
This week we are going to look at some of the recent
Black Star promos. Today in particular we are looking
at XY Black Star Promos XY24: Greninja.
Right off the bat you can’t help but notice this is a
Darkness-Type. XY: Phantom Forces increased the
support for Psychic-Types, which also upped the amount
of Psychic-Types being played and that matters because
Darkness Weakness is sometimes found on Psychic-Types
that represent Ghost-Types from the TCG. There isn’t a
tremendous amount of Darkness-Type Weakness out there,
but it exists. Darkness Resistance, on the other hand
didn’t exist until recently but now its found on every
Fairy-Type released so far. Darkness-Type support isn’t
as impressive as it once was; they lack direct support
outside of Zoroark (BW: Dark Explorers
71/108; BW: Legendary Treasures 90/113) and all
that is simply an attack on a Stage 1 attacker that hits
harder for each Darkness-Type you have in play. In
terms of indirect support, however, they fare much
better thanks to Darkrai-EX, Shadow Circle,
Yveltal (XY 78/146; XY Black Star
Promos XY06) and Yveltal-EX that have helped
shaped the format (less so the middle two). The are
also a few cards that seem to specifically counter, but
they aren’t very good. Taking all of this into
consideration (and the fact that the other Types have
finally been getting their own support) and the
Darkness-Type is probably middle-of-the-road by now.
Being a Stage 2 is definitely a disadvantage right now,
though to be fair it has been for years at this point.
For a while things were really looking up for Stage 2
Pokémon but now that Item lock is so easily available
via Seismitoad-EX, it has gone from challenging
to get a Stage 2 deck (whether the Stage 2 is an
attacker or Bench-sitter) set up in a quick and reliable
manner to frustratingly difficult. With the
intermediary Stages usually being nothing but filler,
stepping stones to get said final form into play, very
few have the raw power or niche usage to justify running
them in competitive play. Moving onto HP, Greninja
sports 130, which seems to be around the amount where a
card goes from being a little more likely to be OHKOed
to being a little more likely to survive; it is far less
thrilling on a Stage 2 than a Basic Pokémon, of course.
Fighting Weakness will render you a relatively easy
OHKO for Fighting-Types; many will just need a Muscle
Band and a Strong Energy for their single
Energy attack(s) to reach OHKO range. Greninja
does sport Psychic Resistance, which is nice; not gaming
breaking, but far better than no Resistance at all and
sometimes quite handy. The single Energy Retreat Cost
rounds out the bottom of the card; its very good as
you’ll rarely be unable to afford it.
So the good news is that Greninja has an Ability
and an attack. What do they do? Mist Concealment
triggers when you play Greninja from hand to
Evolve one of your Pokémon (so something like Evosoda
wouldn’t trigger it); when you do Greninja is
protected from all effects of attacks by your opponent’s
Pokémon including damage during your opponent’s
next turn. That’s really handy, but can be bypassed by
anything that ignores effects on the Defending Pokémon
in addition to using Garbodor (BW:
Dragons Exalted
54/124; BW: Plasma Freeze 119/116; BW:
Legendary Treasures 68/113) to shut off Abilities or
attacking a different Pokémon. As this is an Ability
and not the effect of an attack, it won’t go away if you
force Greninja to the Bench. For [DC]
Greninja can attack with Shadow Bullet (awesome
name) for 60 damage plus 20 to one of your opponent’s
Benched Pokémon. This isn’t bad, but its not especially
good; “adequate” might even be too strong. Why? For
two Energy, the damage hits the going rate of 60; 70
would be better so that a Muscle Band would hit
that magic 90 to the opponent’s Active Pokémon, but if
it really is against a Pokémon-EX you can do so with
Silver Bangle, while so far the only non-Pokémon-EX
that would be too big to survive two Muscle Band
boosted attacks (without HP boosting effects) is
Wailord (BW: Dragons Exalted 26/124).
So what happens when you mix the Ability and attack?
Good things… if you can get the set-up I suggested
going. One turn of being nigh invulnerable means you
should be able to use Shadow Bullet twice. If you
aren’t able to boost the damage output then you’re going
to struggle to keep up in Prizes, let alone pull ahead.
If you can get off one but you lose your Pokémon Tool,
your Energy or anything else you may have been using to
up your damage, then again, it will be a struggle.
We’ll delve more into what to try to combine with all
of this but first let us address getting Grininja
into play. Froakie currently is available in two
flavors, though there are four actual Froakie
cards: Kalos Starter Set 12/39, XY Black Star
Promos XY03 and McDonald’s Collection 2014
4/12 versus XY 39/146. All are Basic, Water-Type
Pokémon with Grass Weakness, no Resistance, a Retreat
Cost of [C] and no Abilities. XY 39/146 has 50
HP plus a single attack - Bounce - that costs [W], hits
for 10 damage and has you flip a coin; if the result is
“heads” you must switch Froakie with a Benched
Pokémon. The attack could help keep it alive, but
requires your run a source of [W] Energy. The other
three enjoy 60 HP and two attacks: Pound for [W] which
does 10 damage and Water Drip for [WC] which does 20.
60 HP is barely better than 50 but while Bounce is the
better attack to have, its such a minor benefit that the
10 HP matters. Go with the 60 HP version.
So what about Frogadier? Straight up two
options; Kalos Starter Set 13/39 or XY
40/146. Both are Water-Type Stage 1 Pokémon with 80 HP,
Grass Weakness, no Resistance, Retreat Costs of [C] and
no Abilities. Kalos Starter Set 13/39 can do 20
for [W] with its Water Drip attack or for [WWC] it can
hit for 40 with two coin flips good for an additional 20
damage per “heads”. XY 40/146 has a single
attack - Lick - for [WC] which does 30 damage plus gives
you a coin flip to inflict Paralysis on the Defending
Pokémon. The short version is that neither of these are
good, especially if you don’t have a reason to run a
source of [W] Energy already in the deck. The threat of
Item lock means you can’t afford to skip them entirely,
though. Pick whichever one strikes your fancy as it
likely won’t matter. At least Rare Candy still
triggers Mist Concealment (Evolution via Rare Candy
still counts as Evolving from your hand), so if your
Items aren’t being locked down and you don’t plan on
trying to bounce Greninja (either the entire line
or just the highest Stage of Evolution), it is most
definitely the way to go.
I would be remiss if I didn’t touch upon the other two
Greninja available for play as well; Kalos
Starter Set 14/39 and XY 41/146 which were
reviewed
here
and
here
about a year ago. What has changed since then?
Surprisingly a lot, but in the end things went almost
full circle. To give you an idea without having to go
back and read those reviews, both are Water-Type Stage 2
Pokémon with Grass Weakness, no Resistance and Retreat
Costs of [C]. Kalos Starter Set 14/39 has 140 HP
and two attacks: Mat Block costs [W] to hit for 40 with
a coin flip to discard an Energy attached to your
opponent’s Active Pokémon and Aqua Edge to hit for 80
damage at a cost of [WWC]; bad but if attacking with a
Stage 2 wasn’t already so dangerous in the first place,
honestly not too far off as the attacks just a little
underpowered (as opposed to massively underpowered).
XY
41/146 has 10 less HP (so 130) but an Ability plus an
attack; Water Shuriken is still amazing as it allows you
(once per turn, though multiple copies stack) to discard
a [W] Energy (currently that means just basic Water
Energy) from your hand to place three damage
counters on one of your opponent’s Pokémon. The set-up
was incredibly difficult but if you did it, a full four
meant up to 120 damage on one Pokémon (or 30 on four
different ones or 60 on one and 30 on two others etc.).
The attack would have been good on something else, but
was merely “okay” here: Mist Slash required [W] (being
inexpensive was pretty important) and scored 50 points
of damage… a very reliable 50 because the effect made
the attack ignore Weakness, Resistance and any effects
on the Defending Pokémon. Too bad there weren’t a lot
of things important for a Greninja to ignore but
ignoring Weakness was (and is) something it could have
exploited. After the release of XY: Flashfire
but before the last set rotation and release of XY:
Furious Fists Stage 2 Pokémon nearly had something
of a resurgence. Then almost as quickly as it happened,
it reversed and now they are still so hard to play.
During this time, Greninja (XY 41/146)
saw successful competitive play while Kalos Starter
Set 14/39 did not and remained pretty useless.
These cards aren’t much competition for today’s
Greninja anymore, but neither are they going to
compliment it.
Which finally gets us to where I’ll try and come up with
at least a hypothetical “fun” deck in which to use this
card. The good news is… yes I do have an idea. At
first I was tempted to try and indeed return Greninja
to hand over and over again to spam its protective
effect, but not only is that incredibly complicated, its
actually pretty fragile. Not only could your opponent
use N, Red Card or some similar effect to
disrupt your hand, not only would you need luck (in
addition to skill) to get Greninja back into play
over and over again so that it wouldn’t clash with your
own usage of almost any draw Supporter - not even just
“the good ones” - as well as Bicycle because
you’re either discarding your hand, shuffling your hand
away or need to shrink your hand to draw more cards; a
Cheren, Tierno and Roller Skates
the draw power I want to try to rely upon. The only
reliable bounce available comes in the form of the Ace
Spec Scoop Up Cyclone or the Supporter AZ
(which doesn’t bounce attached cards), or you can return
a Greninja to the deck with Cassius but
that makes you even more dependent upon draw and search
and all require running a lot of Rare Candy
and Frogadier. Even if you somehow kept
this strategy flowing, you’re going to have to get
multiple Froakie, Frogadier and/or
Ditto (BW: Boundaries Crossed 108/149) into
play so you can keep Evolving into protection and that
means your opponent could turn to Bench hits,
Lysandre, etc. to keep taking Prizes while ignoring
Mist Concealment.
So… what else could one do? Bench a few Robo
Substitute or any Pokémon you feel is worth risking
being KOed in place of Greninja. Anytime you
successfully Evolve into Greninja, its protected,
so if your opponent decides to attack around it, well
you’ve got your 130 HP Stage 2 that has Energy still
handy for the next turn. Technically that is also true
of the Bounce strategy, but by just leaving it as is,
you can keep attacking with it and force your opponent
to choose; deal with what is attacking and hope you (the
player running Greninja in this hypothetical)
can’t get the next one going or hope that you can’t take
sufficient KOs. Robo Substitute is there because
you just don’t care if your opponent forces it Active
and KOs it for no Prizes, but it still keeps you
from losing due to “Benching Out” should your opponent
succeed in taking out your Greninja (this would
also be useful if you did attempt to constantly bounce
Greninja to spam Mist Concealment). The turns
when Mist Concealment isn’t in effect you’ll be Benching
and attaching an Energy to your next attacker… probably
a Froakie waiting to Evolve itself. This is
still pretty complex but at least seems a little more
doable, and its still fairly fragile: both have to worry
about Abilities being shut off or Items being prevented
from seeing play, but this one “just” has to worry about
the normal hassles of set-up and maintaining the field
instead of doing all that while successfully bouncing an
attacker.
Ratings
Standard:
1.75/5 - This is actually a decent score for a Stage 2
right now; the established “good” ones are doing well to
clock in as a
⅗
with all they have going against them, with former
borderline cases now down to about
⅖.
This
card actually feels pretty close to being legitimately
useful, as opposed to blatant filler or creative but
clearly nerfed.
Expanded:
1.95/5 - This is why I like having two decimal places in
the score, even if it looks like I’ve mixed a decimal
based number with a fraction; here Greninja gains
access to Dark Patch and a few other useful
tricks like (maybe) Shedinja (BW: Dragons
Exalted 48/124) that really should help it, but it
still strikes me as being too complex/fragile for the
format to be anything more than a fun (and hopefully
functional) deck, so still not quite worth a
⅖.
Limited:
N/A - This card is only a promo and thus under normal
circumstances cannot be used for Limited play. If it
were re-released into a set the rest of the set would
matter, the same if the promo were merely allowed into a
typical Limited event. Barring extenuating
circumstances (such as being released in a set with
disproportionate amounts of Fighting-Types and/or
Psychic-Types like the last two) I would think it - like
many Stage 2 Pokémon - it would be something you’d
really try to work into your deck unless they were
really incompatible, like if you had a +39 deck or
absolutely couldn’t make room for enough basic
Darkness Energy without cutting something as good or
better.
Summary:
Greninja is an interesting concept and had it
released when Broken Time-Space was legal then it
might have been “broken” itself (though there were ways
to shut down Poké-Powers, Poké-Bodies and possibly both
at the same time). As is, right now, it is sadly
underpowered because we have this bizarre metagame where
it seems like for one moment we are being encouraged to
run decks built around big, Basic Pokémon, driving with
almost pure Supporter based draw power but then we get
stuff to encourage more use of Evolutions, good Item
based search and even the return of Item based draw
power and… then we get counters to Items and it all
shifts back to mostly big, Basic Pokémon, though now
instead of games that are mercifully short when they are
one-sided, they get to be potentially tedious as you’re
locked down while Seismitoad-EX slowly beats you
down. It makes this card somewhat bittersweet; it’s not
just filler (which is good) but at the same time
Greninja seems likely to go to waste because
Greninja isn’t going to have a chance to make use of
what it has going for itself.
|
