aroramage |
And now we touch on the brand new
mechanic in this particular set: BREAK Evolution. As I
understand it, BREAK Evolution is pretty much like every
other Evolution, so it follows all the same rules as
Evolution, i.e., you can't BREAK Evolve a Pokemon you
just played, you have to have the Pokemon in play first,
etc. The interesting thing about BREAK Evolution is that
you can play it down on ANY Pokemon with the name of the
card you're BREAK Evolving into, and instead of
completely replacing all the text on the former card,
you get a sort of "Shrine of Memories" effect where you
access all the attacks, Abilities, Weaknesses,
Resistances, and Retreat Costs of the Pokemon you BREAK
Evolve from. In short, it's a way of breathing new life
to standard non-EX Evolutions to make them more powerful
in the face of the daunting EX.
Cause let's face it, EX are already
pretty powerful.
Luckily, two such BREAK Evolutions
in this set are actually competitively viable, and
Florges BREAK just happens to be one of them. In
addition to looking at the main BREAK card, we decided
we would also take a look at the Florges included in
this set, as the two work really well together. Keeping
in mind though the only other viable Florges to use this
with would be the one from Flashfire, as Florges-EX
is...well, not a "Florges" but a "Florges-EX". Not to
mention the BREAK would be a little bit of a downgrade
with only 140 HP compared to Florges-EX's 160 HP, BUT
DETAILS!!
Starting off with the regular Stage
2 Florges, she wields an already powerful Ability in
Calming Aroma. Effectively, she makes all Fairy-type
Pokemon's attacks that much cheaper by an entire
FAIRY-TYPED Energy. This is a pretty powerful Ability to
have, as no doubt seen with Dimension Valley's effect on
Psychic decks, though the attachment to a Stage 2 does
make this a lot slower than throwing down a Stadium.
Still, I imagine this will help boost Fairy decks back
into the limelight once more so that they can go
toe-to-toe with other decks at a much faster rate. But
why stop there? Since this affects ALL of your Pokemon,
Fairy decks may even be able to tech in some
Dragon-types that run on Fairy Energy! Not to mention it
makes Florges' own attack, Wonder Shine, just that
little bit cheaper, since it already costs 3 Fairy
Energy to deal 70 damage and automatically Confuse the
opponent.
Compared to Flashfire's version
that wields the power of Brilliant Search and dealing 20
damage apiece with Petal Blizzard, it's easy to see why
an upgraded Florges would be useful. And then Florges
BREAK comes in, showing off that BREAK Evolutions don't
necessarily need to carry attacks - they can tack on
extra Abilities too! And Floral Breeze is a pretty good
support one, healing off 30 damage from the Active and
removing their Status Condition with ease. This
effectively checks things like Sceptile-EX and Ariados
who will frequently Poison your Pokemon to deal more
damage for the KO like what HTL did back in its heyday.
And if Rough Seas is any indicator of how powerful
healing off even just 30 damage a turn is, then Florges
BREAK deserves some play in Fairy decks.
The only real drawback to Florges
as a BREAK Evolution though is the amount of cards
required - at minimum, getting to a full Florges BREAK
takes up 4 cards (the Basic Flabébé, either Floette or
Rare Candy, the regular Stage 2 Florges, and THEN
Florges BREAK), which is a LOT of investment into it. If
you're running the full set, you're taking up 16 cards
in your 60-card deck, making an entire fourth of your
deck devoted to just Florges BREAK. With something like
this, it's a really REALLY tight squeeze, so whether or
not Florges BREAK even sees play will be because of how
useful its Ability is seen as.
And maybe it's worth running at
least one just to keep your opponent on their toes!
Rating
Standard: 3/5 (a hefty bit slower
than most Evolutionary lines, but with the Ability, hehe,
to keep healing off stuff and combine with the Ability
to make one's attacks cheaper, Florges and Florges BREAK
combine into a powerful support for Fairy decks)
Expanded: 2.5/5 (though she is
great support, there's only so much you can do with an
Evolution that requires 4 cards)
Limited: 4/5 (your mileage will
vary here for sure, but again, cheaper attacks and
constant healing/Status removal will make things quite
challenging for your opponent...provided you get all the
set-up you can get)
Arora Notealus: Florges getting a
BREAK Evolution is really nice, especially considering
she needed a much better Evolution than the Flashfire
variant, and the whole BREAK Evolution adds some power
to her that regular Evolutions need. Unfortunately, this
much effort for just a really good support may not
necessarily be worth it, but hey, I dunno, it could be
worth running one!
Next Time: MAGNETS. JUST. MAGNETS.
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Otaku |
Our ninth place pick is Florges (XY:
BREAKthrough 103/162) and Florges BREAK (XY:
BREAKthrough 104/162). That is right, two
different cards but this time, it isn’t because they are
tied but because BREAK Evolutions are basically half a
card. I don’t know if this is more or less
confusing for those of us that remember the Level-Up
cards released during the DP- and Platinum-eras.
In fact, I am just going to
link to the official site for an explanation.
If you can’t use that, the short version is that BREAK
Evolutions Evolve from what is normally a fully Evolved
Pokémon, is placed sideways on top of what it Evolves
from because you still use the prior Stages Weakness,
Resistance, Retreat costs, attacks and Abilities.
I think the card’s Stage becomes “BREAK” and I know you
use the BREAK Evolutions Type, Hit Points and anything
else printed on the BREAK Evolutions card (like
additional Abilities or attacks). You do have to
follow all normal Evolution rules, so for a most
relevant example, you have to wait a turn after Evolving
into Florges before you can BREAK Evolve into
Florges BREAK. Something I’ll mention because
it is different from the old Level-Up cards is that yes,
“BREAK” is a part of the card’s name so you may
have four Florges and four Florges BREAK
in the same deck. The “Lv.X” designation on
Level-Up cards was not considered part of the
name, hence me bringing it up at all.
I’ll start with what is common to both cards: being a
Fairy-Type. XY-era Dragon-Types have so far all
been Fairy Weak but that’s it, while nothing resists
Fairy-Types. Exclusive Fairy-Type support (that
which explicitly only works for Fairy-Type Pokémon) is
not overly impressive but when we look at support that
either applies to [Y] Energy we get some winners like
Fairy Garden, which zeroes out the Retreat Cost of
cards with a source of [Y] Energy attached and
Aromatisse (XY 93/146) which allows you to
freely move around your in play [Y] providing Energy
cards from Pokémon to Pokémon (well, only on your own
side of the field). Fairy-Type decks aren’t absent
from the competitive scene, but either use something
off-Type in a totally supporting role like Slurpuff
(XY: Phantom Forces 69/119) or otherwise seem to
be Fairy Transfer variants. Everything else is
either different between the cards as I’m not counting
aspects shared only because Florges BREAK would
be played on top of Florges (XY: BREAKthrough
103/162). So now we’ll have fun bouncing back and
forth between the two.
Florges
is a Stage 2 Pokémon and that makes it resource
intensive; at least two other cards and a turn of
waiting will go towards getting it into play.
We’ll cover its lower Stages (and the other versions)
after we finish with the rest of this Florges and
then Florges BREAK; just remember that when
compared to the time, space and general user friendly
nature of Basic Pokémon and even Stage 1s, being a Stage
2 is a definite drawback. This means Florges
BREAK is effectively a “Stage 3” Pokémon and effects
that explicitly reference Stage 2 Pokémon won’t apply to
Florges BREAK; not that most of us use
Training Center but it won’t grant an HP bonus to
Florges BREAK. Florges has just 110 HP: all
but a few decks (namely those focused on attack effects
more than damage) will be able to rapidly, reliably and
repeatedly score a OHKO and remember that as a Stage 2
you’ll be granting your opponent at least one turn of
setting up over a similarly sized Basic. Florges
BREAK jumps up to 140 HP which is notably more
stable but still capable of being OHKOed by more than
just a few decks; again if it isn’t focusing more on
attack effects than damage, a deck will be able to reach
140 damage once its set-up is complete, possibly
multiple times and without needing a lot of time for the
setup.
Metal Weakness isn’t the worst but the Type has seen
successful competitive play without going too far back,
though not always as the main attacker. With just
110 HP, “big” attacks by Metal-Types were already going
to score the OHKO against Florges so on it the
main concern is allowing a weaker, less resource
intensive attack to do the deed. Florges BREAK
has the same problem, except fewer weaker attacks turn
into OHKOs and fewer of the moderately sized attacks
would score the KO without Weakness. Darkness
Resistance will make either of these slightly harder to
OHKO; due to their specific HP scores, this may prove
relevant as it shifts Florges from being OHKO by
something like a Muscle Band enhanced “Y Cyclone”
scoring a OHKO to a Yveltal-EX needing to just go
with “Evil Ball” and Florges BREAK needing an
effective 160 damage to be OHKOed. So this time,
Resistance may be relevant, at least if the rest of the
cards live up to their ranking. The single Energy
Retreat Cost on Florges is great; easy to pay and
to recover from having paid for most decks.
Florges
has one Ability and attack. The former is “Calming
Aroma” and it drops the attack costs of your Pokémon by
[Y]. The way this Ability is worded I believe it
stacks; so with one instance of Calming Aroma attacks
that cost [Y] become free, two means attacks that cost
[YY] become free, etc. It does not affect
any other Types of Energy costs; even if a Fairy-Type
needs just [C] to attack, it still needs [C] to
attack even if you somehow get four copies of Calming
Aroma in play. It doesn’t specify a Pokémon-Type
either; while most cards with [Y] Energy costs
are indeed Fairy-Types, all versions of the Dragon-Type
Goodra have had at least one [Y] Energy cost in
its attacks. Florges also has an attack called
“Wonder Shine” that requires [YYY] to hit for 70 and
Confuse the opponent’s Active. That is a little
overpriced on its own, but unless Calming Aroma is being
negated, it will actually only require [YY], which is a
bit better. Regrettably, even if you have two
other copies of Calming Aroma on the field to completely
zero out the attack cost, I don’t like having something
so small using an attack that isn’t going to take a
OHKO. The Confusion provides a smidgen of
protection, but not enough for a Stage 2, or BREAK
Evolution of a Stage 2, or Mew-EX using Wonder
Shine via its “Versatile” Ability, etc. It is good
that the two work together so well and is a better
“filler” attack than I would have expected. The
Ability is the important thing though and we’ll discuss
its potential uses soon enough.
Florges BREAK
adds the Ability “Floral Breeze”, which allows you to
heal 30 damage and a Special Condition from your Active
Pokémon once per turn before you attack. If you
manage to get multiple copies of Florges BREAK
(and thus Floral Breeze) into play, they can both be
used once per turn. A nice little trick but not
something that makes me want to run Florges BREAK
for its own sake. It definitely is relying on
whatever Florges is contributing to justify its
inclusion and that may not actually be a bad thing so
long as we have a worthwhile Florges. The
real rival for her is whatever else might be used to
buff Florges or heal Pokémon in play or replace
the entire line. Of course you’re not going to
find something that does it all, but if it does less
while taking less space and thus being more reliable,
that is often better.
Florges
evolves from Floette Evolves from Flabébé.
We have three options for Flabébé: XY:
Flashfire 62/106, XY: Flashfire 63/106 and
XY: BREAKthrough 101/162). All are Basic,
Fairy-Type Pokémon with Metal Weakness, Darkness
Resistance, Retreat Cost [C], no Ancient Trait, no
Ability and a single attack. XY: Flashfire
62/106 has 40 HP and for [Y] can use her “Aromatherapy”
attack to heal 10 damage from each of your Pokémon. XY:
Flashfire 63/106 also has 40 HP but for [C] she can
use Razor Leaf for 10. XY: BREAKthrough 101/162
has only 30 HP and her “Wish” attack requires [Y] and a
coin flip; “tails” means the attack does nothing but on
“heads” you get to search your deck for any one card you
want and add it to hand. All three of these are
easily KOed if stuck up in the Active slot, so the
attacks aren’t all that meaningful. Still I would
avoid XY: Flashfire 63/106 because she can’t cash
in on Calming Aroma and while Wish is amazing when you
get “heads” that 30 HP means several effects can OHKO
this version while it is on the Bench. So by
default go with XY: Flashfire 62/106; who knows
maybe healing 10 off of everything could come in handy.
Floette
is similar, with the options being XY: Flashfire
64/106, XY: Flashfire 65/106 and XY:
BREAKthrough 102/162; all are Stage 1 Fairy-Type
Pokémon with 70 HP, Metal Weakness, Darkness Resistance,
Retreat Cost [C] and no Ancient Trait. XY: Flashfire
64/106 has the Ability “Flower Veil” that boost the HP
of your Grass-Type Pokémon by 20 (and yes multiples
stack) while for [Y] she can use “Fairy Wind” to attack
for 20 damage. XY: Flashfire 65/106 has two
attacks: for [Y] she can use “Petal Blizzard” to hit all
of your opponent’s Pokémon for 10 damage while for [YC]
it can use “Razor Leaf” for 30. XY: BREAKthrough
102/162 “Aroma Therapy” for [Y] though this time it
heals 30 damage from each of your Pokémon, while for
[YY] she can use “Magical Leaf” to hit for 20 damage and
flip a coin: “tails” means the attack just does the
initial 20 but on “heads” the attack does an additional
20 (so 40) plus heals 20 from herself. All three
of these fail at being really worth the effort, but due
to Item lock I would be leery of relying solely or even
mostly on Rare Candy; if you have no Grass-Types
ignore XY: Flashfire 64/106 and unless your deck
is built around them only consider making one Floette
this version. Take your pick for either of the
remaining two for your other Floette needs.
There is one other Florges to be released so far:
XY: Flashfire 66/106. It has the same
attributes as today’s version but with two different
attacks and no Ability or Ancient Trait. For [C]
she can use “Brilliant Search” to do just that:
brilliantly search your deck for three cards of your
choice to add to your hand. For [Y] it can use
“Petal Blizzard” to hit all of your opponent’s Pokémon
for 20 damage each. These would be amazing on a
Basic Pokémon and perhaps still worth it on a Stage 1,
but not on a Stage 2 or pseudo-Stage 3 if you use it to
BREAK Evolve, not even as a single. You can find a
review for this Florges
here;
the reviewers were quite generous (I wanted it to
somehow work as well), which is why it manages to score
as well as it did (and 2.5/5 isn’t exactly “good” in the
first place). Floette (XY: Flashfire
64/406) also got
its own review
due to the Ability and again, I can’t speak for the
others but I thought there had to be some use in buffing
Grass-Types and so far, I have been quite, quite wrong
so again, the scores are too high.
So are either Florges BREAK or Florges (XY:
BREAKthrough 103/162) worth running in a deck?
We don’t have tournament results for some nice, obvious
data and I haven’t been reading or watching a lot on the
uses for the cards in this set, so I can only speculate.
I don’t think Florges BREAK is worth it, but this
new Florges has generated a lot of ideas.
Granted they are all similar:
1.
Bench Florges.
2.
Use reduced cost attackers.
3.
???
4.
Win
Step 3 is pretty important to be represented by that
joke but that is the point; I can only look at a few
Fairy-Types and ask “How much better would they be with
just eliminating some or all of the attack cost versus
going with something tried and true like a Fairy
Transfer deck?” The one example that leaps to my mind
is appropriately enough Florges-EX. Though
it only sports 160 HP, this Basic Pokémon-EX has an
attack for [Y] called “Lead” that allows you to search
your deck for a Supporter to add it to your hand and
another attack for [YC] called “Bright Garden” that does
20 damage times the number of your Grass and Fairy
Pokémon in play. It sees a tiny bit of use in
Fairy Transfer decks but other attackers simply do
better. I tried building a deck around it that
didn’t use Fairy Transfer and while it could be fun,
mostly it was frustrating because of how difficult it
was to stream Bright Garden hits. It is possible
lowering the cost of each attack by [Y] would solve a
lot of this, though the fact that any Shaymin-EX
on your Bench subtract from your maximum damage is
another concern: I tried just using Slurpuff
instead and had mixed results. Florges (XY:
BREAKthrough 103/162) would need space and time but
in a weird way it might be a relief for this particular
deck that Florges-EX can only benefit from a
single Calming Aroma; you won’t have to set-up multiple
copies of the Stage 2.
Still for competitive Standard and Expanded play this is
a longshot; other Stage 2 cards that have proven
themselves recently either use a super shortcut like
Archie’s Ace in the Hole or have a useful Stage 1
form as well or work as part of a lock. I consider
it worse for Expanded play because it just seems that
much more fragile and faces that much more general
competition. For Limited play it all depends on
how many other Pokémon you pull that use [Y] Energy… at
least for regular Florges. You might risk
Florges BREAK for the Ability. So if you
get all that, go for it but if you only have some of it,
I’d skip it.
Ratings
Florges
(XY: BREAKthrough 103/162)
Standard:
3/5
Expanded:
2/5
Limited:
3/5
Florges BREAK
Standard:
1.75/5
Expanded:
1.25/5
Limited:
3/5
Both
Summary:
Florges offers the faint promise of killer
attacks for budget prices but I don’t know how to help
it cash in on that. Florges BREAK offers just an
HP boost and so-so Ability for a lot of extra hassle,
and that assumes you have already justified including
today’s Florges; it doesn’t offer anywhere near
enough validate running the line on its own.
I had Florges on my list as #15; I still gave it
too much credit. Florges BREAK didn’t make my
list, or at least didn’t until we settled upon reviewing
BREAK Evolutions alongside their non-BREAK counterpart
from the set. If one of the others knows how and
why to use either of these, I’ll be thrilled to be
wrong… because at the very least I own M Glalie-EX
an apology as this card garnered the same number of
voting points as it did but I broke the tie in the favor
of Florges and Florges BREAK.
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