aroramage |
Welcome to another week of Roaring
Skies! And now to show off why the skies are roaring in
the first place - and no, it's not because it's the 4th
of July this weekend, although we are going to be taking
Friday off because of it. No, this is for the DRAGONS!!
So many Dragons, so many that we're taking these next
couple of weeks to review them all! Starting with some
new Dragon support in the form of Reshiram!
Take a wild guess why we're looking
at Reshiram. Go on, I bet you'll never get it. Like how
it's probably not Bright Wing, which is a hefty
4-for-110 strike that requires a discard of Fire Energy
from him to work. Not to say 110 isn't a pretty
interesting number to hit, considering with Muscle Band
that would basically KO anything like Reshiram. Strange.
No, but Reshiram's Turboblaze is
definitely the Ability that marks a new era of
Dragon-based support (and an era of great disappointment
that Zekrom did not get a similar Ability, but maybe
that'd be just too excessive). Turboblaze allows you to
attach a Fire Energy from your hand to one of your
Dragon-type Pokemon as long as Reshiram is the Active
Pokemon.
Alright, so it's not the most
universal of Abilities, like how Eelektrik's Dynamotor
or Bronzong's Metal Links are, but it's still very
useful for any Dragon-types that use Fire Energy. Of
note, this includes Rayquaza-EX (DEX) and more notably M
Rayquaza-EX (the Dragon one) from this set! Both benefit
greatly from Reshiram's acceleration, and while the same
can't be said for every Dragon-type Pokemon in the TCG,
the extra attachment can work out for a variety of
Colorless Energy costs.
Some of the downsides to this is
that Reshiram is required to be Active, and getting him
out of the Active slot requires at least either paying
two Energy for the Retreat Cost, using a Switch card of
some kind, or just letting him get KO'd. You also have
to have the Fire Energy in your hand to attach it, which
makes drawing cards pretty important rather than simply
discarding them into the discard pile in order to draw
more cards - so Sycaper is important, but without
Lysandre's Banned Card, you have to be much more
judicious in how you play him.
Still, Reshiram will prove to be a
valuable asset to anyone in need of Fire-based
Dragon-support power, so stock up on any you can! Who
knows what future Dragons we'll get that can benefit
from Reshiram!
Or at least we'll see what new
Dragons end up being better.
Rating
Standard: 3/5 (a fairly powerful
support card for powerful Dragon cards)
Expanded: 3.5/5 (you should
consider running him alongside your Eels here for
ridiculously faster and more powerful Rayquaza-EX
strikes on consecutive turns!)
Limited: 3.5/5 (really just depends
on if you get Dragons that work well with Fire)
Arora Notealus: You know, I gotta
admit, after Gen IV came around and gave us dragons for
time, space, and then gave us the Creator Pokemon - oh
excuse me, the "Alpha Pokemon" - it seemed like Gen V
was going to have a tough time coming up with something
to impress us. And then out comes Reshiram and Zekrom
for truth and ideals. It was quite a turnaround, but for
what it was going for, I think it worked very well. Now
if they could just do that but make the team conflict
less centralized around the legendaries like with Lugia
and Ho-oh...
Next Time: Behold the mightiest of
dragons in all his glory!!
|
Otaku |
Welcome to the first week of our Dragon-Type coverage
for XY: Roaring Skies (give or take a promo).
Granted, this review is actually being posted for your
perusal nearly eight weeks late. Being an obsessive
otaku, I decided to finally finish it, as it was about
half written already. As such my review obviously
enjoys the benefit of having had a lot of time to see
how this card actually fared.
We’ll start with Reshiram (XY: Roaring Skies
63/108), a Basic Dragon-Type Pokémon; being a Basic is
still the best but what about being a Dragon-Type? It
hurts that the only thing with Dragon Weakness in the
TCG are BW-era Dragon-Types but most decks are merely
enhanced by their Weakness-exploiting match-ups, not
made by them. Nothing is Dragon Resistant which is a
small bonus and Dragon-Types have some good support
(though so far I’m not convinced they are better than my
usual reference point: Fighting-Types). There is at
least one example of an “anti-Dragon-Type” card -
Bisharp (BW: Plasma Freeze 73/116) but it
isn’t very good and it took me these eight weeks to
remember it even existed in the first place. All in
all, I’d say at worst being a Dragon-Type is a good but
not great Type, though given that XY: Ancient Origins
(released but not legal for tournament play since this
review went up late but not quite that late),
sometimes I wish this was a Fire-Type (whether or not it
that altered its own Ability).
Reshiram
has 130 HP; it doesn’t get any better unless you’re an
Evolution or Pokémon-EX. This has a decent chance of
surviving a hit, but as a reminder this is my general
perception; a “guesstimate”, not a carefully reasoned or
calculated figure. The only good Weakness is no
Weakness, but Fairy Weakness might be one of the less
problematic ones to get stuck with when you’re sitting
at 130 HP; the reason being that most of the Fairy-Type
attackers you’ll have to worry about are going to score
a OHKO regardless plus Fairy-Types usually don’t show up
splashed into other decks. No Resistance on the other
hand is unambiguously the worst though it also seems to
be the default and Resistance as a whole is not
especially powerful so it doesn’t especially hurt the
card. The Retreat Cost of [CC] is also pretty typical;
it isn’t low enough to be especially easy to pay (up
front or for the long term) but it isn’t so high that
you won’t be able to in most builds.
Reshiram
has one Ability (Turboblaze) and one attack (Bright
Wing). The former is heavily restricted Energy
acceleration: it requires Reshiram be Active,
only works with a specific Energy-Type (Fire) for a
Specific Pokémon-Type (Dragon) and is once-per-turn, but
it is the kind of once-per-turn that can stack (a bit
trickier here due to the “only while Active” clause).
Energy acceleration can be incredibly potent, though
when heavily restricted even it can misfire, but on a
Basic Pokémon it still looks promising. Bright Wing
requires [RRLC] to hit for 110, plus requires you
discard a [R] Energy from Reshiram. This is one
of those attacks where I can’t bring myself to call it
“bad”, but neither am I comfortable calling it “good”…
because it isn’t, at least if viewed in isolation. Four
Energy is steep (even with Turboblaze) and the
requirements are three-fourths specific Energy with two
different specific Energy Types. With the discard added
in, if this was being run primarily as an attacker it
would be lackluster at best, but with the Ability added
in it seems… adequate. I still wouldn’t build a deck
around attacking with this Reshiram but it seems
a plausible attack option for a deck already using it
for the Ability.
There are only two other versions of Reshiram:
both are Basic, Fire-Type Pokémon with 130 HP, Water
Weakness, no Resistance, Retreat Cost [CC], no
Abilities, no Ancient Traits and have two attacks. The
first Reshiram released has many reprints
available so that you have a total of seven versions of
the exact same card (just with different art) to pick
from: Black & White 26/114, Black & White
113/114, BW Black Star Promos BW004, BW Black
Star Promos BW23, BW: Next Destinies 21/99,
BW: Legendary Treasures 28/113, BW: Legendary
Treasures 114/113 and BW: Legendary Treasures
RC22/RC25. It features “Outrage” for [CC], allowing it
to hit for 20 damage plus 10 per damage counter on
itself. Its big attack is Blue Flare for [RRC] that
hits for 120 but then makes you discard two [R] Energy
attached to Reshiram. This card has been
reviewed
three
times
by the CotD crew; I encourage you to read those but not
to know what the card is like now, but instead to
learn what the metagame was like back then.
While it is still a great Fire-Type attacker, though it
has long since stopped being one of the top attackers in
the format. Now it is usually the “go-to”,
non-Pokémon-EX Fire-Type attacker in Fire-decks, but
skipped if the energy acceleration is lacking or space
is truly absent. Outrage is good enough to get it
splashed into decks that need a Fire attacker that can
use any Energy, even though it has to survive a hit to
do major damage, but again not all the time.
The other other Reshiram is BW: Plasma
Freeze 17/116. Yes, this one just gets a single
release. As stated it matches up to the older version
in almost every way, with the only game relevant
differences being its attacks. For [RCC] it can use
“Purifying Flame” to hit for 50 points of damage while
removing all Special Conditions form itself, while for
just one Energy more ([RCCC]) it can hit for 80 damage,
plus another 40 (so 120 total) if you have a Zekrom.
That would be any iteration of Zekrom so long as
its name is only “Zekrom”: Zekrom-EX won’t
work for this. You can read the old review
here:
unfortunately I got it wrong. It never caught on in the
decks that could accommodate the massive requirements
(Energy plus Zekrom) without also being
able to accommodate the Energy demands of the (at the
time only) other version. At least I got that Purifying
Flame didn’t seem well thought out: there five Special
Conditions and of them, Burn is almost non-existent in
competitive play, Confusion has a 50% chance of
preventing either the damage or effect from being done
(while placing three damage counters on Reshiram),
Paralysis prevents the attack from happening (before
going away at the end of your turn), Poison will have
already hit you once and outside of lock decks is
usually used to secure an effective OHKO and Sleep will
also prevent you from attacking (though it may or may
not go away on its own). Even if the attack hit harder,
the effect would be negligible.
So all this proves that today’s Reshiram…
probably isn’t competing with either of its
predecessors. I’d have skipped covering them but how I
review is by thoroughly going over the card and showing
why something is or isn’t a good idea. The true
competition for Reshiram will be other forms of
Energy acceleration compatible with the appropriate
Dragon-Type Pokémon, but the other options may
compliment each other instead of compete, namely
Double Dragon Energy and Mega Turbo
(obviously only when dealing with Mega Evolutions). If
you’ve got room for one (or both) of these alongside
Reshiram, you can do some pretty sweet tricks. Even
just two can make almost any three Energy attack on a
Dragon-Type a reasonable, single turn play. Of course
those attackers that actually have [R] Energy
requirements are going to enjoy Turboblaze more. Reshiram
appears to have been intentionally designed to combo
with Hydreigon-EX or Float Stone or pretty
much any other “switching” card that allows you to at
least promote it after something was KOed, attach an
extra Fire Energy and then get it out of your
way; Switch provides the usual benefit while
acting a bit like a Dark Patch when combined with
Reshiram and a spare Fire Energy in hand.
Turns when you can’t attack (including first turn) you
can throw Reshiram up front even if you can’t get
it out of your way, still enjoying Turboblaze while
Reshiram soaks an opponent’s attack or two. You’re
still out a Prize, but usually that is better than a
Pokémon-EX or something you are trying to power-up.
So what attackers work well with this? That is the
(potentially) tournament winning question. So far I
haven’t seen any compelling finishes with anything yet
to clue us in. This Reshiram is useful to
itself; that massive four Energy cost is only made
manageable thanks to Turboblaze (and usually a second
Turboblaze, a means of changing out your Active, and a
Double Dragon Energy). Hydreigon-EX
becomes a much better attacker, though still a secondary
one: with Double Dragon Energy and a Turboblaze
you can use its “Shred” attack without any previous prep
to hit for 80 damage while ignoring protective effects
on the opponent’s Active. M Rayquaza-EX (XY:
Roaring Skies 61/108) seems to be the intended
beneficiary with not only a massive attack cost of
[RRRLC] but an effect that discards two Energy from
itself, it hits hard (300 damage) but requires a lot of
resources to keep going. I’ve encountered the deck on
the PTCGO and it seems like one of those decks that is
brutal to beat when it gets set-up but getting set-up is
its Achilles’ Heel. It might be worth poking and seeing
what other Dragon-Types (maybe even the odd card that
Evolves from a Dragon-Type) could work with it. So
experiment with it in Standard and Expanded, and unless
you pull something around which you can build a good +39
deck or you can’t justify running about half (or
more) your Energy as Fire Energy with a source of
[L] Energy, you’ll want to include this. That… is
actually a bit more narrow a usage in Limited than it
sounds.
Ratings
Standard:
3/5
Expanded:
3/5
Limited:
3.25/5
Summary:
The benefit of being tardy is that I know this
Reshiram still hasn’t found a compelling home, but
it isn’t going anywhere so every new Dragon-Type
released brings a new chance. The almost-here rotation
for Standard and addition of XY: Ancient Origins
is a bit too far removed for me to predict; this is a
support card and I’m still working out where I think the
“big name” cards are going to fall. Hazarding a guess
though, I don’t think it will get better and may become
even less plausible.
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