Emma Starr |
Today we look at Ampharos EX, whom
if they weren’t an EX, would evolve from sheep…somehow
(I mean, in Stadium 2, the thing makes the bleating
sound of a sheep, but it’s honestly weird because…it
just has hardly any semblance to a sheep whatsoever!).
It’s Retreat Cost of two, though
somewhat easy to pay using its first attack, is actually
pretty generous, considering how awfully slow it is in
the games. It’s 170 HP is right near many other EXs, but
Fighting weakness is never good, because Fighting types
are still popular, and probably will be for quite some
time now still.
It’s first attack which I briefly
mentioned earlier is Thunder Rod, which lets you search
the top 4 cards of your deck for any amount of Electric
energy, then attach it to Ampharos EX. It only costs a
Colorless Energy, which is nice if you need to quickly
power it up, but the real problem is that Ampharos EX
has to be active to use this, obviously. I feel if this
were an ability, it’d be much more viable to make use
of, even with the threat of Silent Lab or Hex Maniac
around. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers.
Additionally, until the Magnezone in Breakthrough came
out, Electric types haven’t had many forms of Energy
acceleration available to them for a while, only having
the mediocre Eelektrik (NoV 40), which is now cursed to
live in Unlimited. But as Breakthrough isn’t legal for
another few weeks, it’s a nice way to power up if
Ampharos was your starting Pokemon. If not, however, and
your opponent is already powered up before you, forgoing
damage in your turn can be painful, and thus, the new
Magnezone is definitely your friend, if you can get him
out quickly enough.
Ampharos’ main attack, Sparkling
Tail, does 100 damage for two Electric and two
Colorless, but comes with the awful effect of the damage
not being effected by
Weakness,
Resistance, or other effects on the Defending Pokemon.
Which means that despite being an Electric type, this
WON’T OHKO a
Shaymin EX, Lugia EX, or Yveltal EX. If you want big
damage on them, I guess Thundurus EX (PC 26) will have
to do (He has a cheaper main attack, but damages himself
badly), or you can change one of your other EXs to an
Electric type via the Jolteon from yesterday. Are there
any positives
to this effect? Well, you can do 20 more damage to
Pokemon who resist Electric, and…you can ignore the 10
damage reductions of Shield Energy…and…that’s about it,
unless the other reviewers think of something else, but
even for a normal main EX attack, 100 damage is pretty
lackluster compared to the normal 120 or 130 damage
attacks. At least Mega Ampharos EX more than makes up
for this weakling, however.
Standard: 2/5 (Useful only for Mega
Evolving into Mega Ampharos EX)
Expanded: 2/5
Limited: 3/5 (Mega Evolve, then zap
Lugia EX and everything else into oblivion. If you
didn’t pull the Mega though, AmpharosEX is still decent
here, I guess.)
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Otaku |
We
conclude this week with Ampharos-EX (XY:
Ancient Origins 27/98, 87/98). As a reminder,
XY: BREAKthrough officially released November
4th, which means it won’t be legal for tournament play
until three weeks later (November 25th); if I notice
something quite relevant I’ll mention it but I am still
trying to get a handle on the set (and new game
mechanics) so for now, this is a review that is for a
pre-XY: BREAKThrough environment.
Ampharos-EX
is a Lightning-Type so as with
yesterday’s CotD
it enjoys hitting some significant and important Pokémon
for double damage via Weakness, only faces Resistance on
BW-era releases, negligible Type-based counters1 and some useful not far from overwhelming support.
Exploiting opposing Weakness nets a “good” Type standing
even though the rest is dancing around one side or the
other of “neutral”. As you can tell by the name
alone, Ampharos-EX is a Pokémon-EX and because I
still frequently run into players that struggle with the
concept, being a Pokémon-EX only guarantees a few
things: being worth an extra Prize when KOed, being
unable to access certain pieces of support and being a
target of certain detrimental (for the player running
the Pokémon-EX) effects. Pokémon-EX that are not
Mega Evolutions gain one other benefit if the underlying
Pokémon is normally an Evolution; instead it becomes a
Basic Pokémon. Everything else associated with
Pokémon-EX may be common but aren’t universally present;
almost all of them get an HP boost but it varies in
amount, with other attributes and card effects that tend
to (but not always) are better than that of
non-Pokémon-EX counterparts. Being a Basic is a
pretty big deal right now; especially as Ampharos
are otherwise Stage 2 Pokémon; it takes minimal time and
effort to get a Basic into play, while Stage 2 are on
the clunkier side of things.
Ampharos-EX
does cash in on an HP bonus; it has 170 which is 10 more
than the largest contemporary Stage 2 cards and 30
points more than its most recent non-Pokémon-EX
counterparts, Ampharos (BW: Dragons Exalted
40/124) and Ampharos (BW: Black Star Promos
BW67). This is enough to have solid odds of
surviving a hit; few decks will hit this amount rapidly,
reliably and repeatedly though yes some of the best
right now can indeed lay claim to all three.
Fighting-Types have an even easier time of due to the
Weakness, to the point where I consider Fighting
Weakness to be one of (if not the) worst right
now, even when that Type isn’t fielding the top deck.
There are multiple Fighting-Types that can score a OHKO
with a single Energy attack: as long as the attack does
at least 30 damage for [C] or [F], Fighting Stadium
plus Muscle Band plus Strong Energy means
a 90 point attack doubles to 180 (non-Pokémon-EX
attackers in this situation can hit for only 20 if they
use Silver Bangle instead of Muscle Band).
Ampharos-EX enjoys Metal Resistance; with the
XY-era this has again become typical of Lightning-Types
and while it isn’t a huge advantage it can be useful;
after all it has 170 HP to work with on this card.
The Retreat Cost of [CC] is low enough you’ll likely be
able to pay (and recover from paying) it but high enough
you probably should include something to lower the cost
or bypass manually retreating Ampharos-EX.
Ampharos-EX
keeps things relatively simple as it has no Ancient
Trait nor an Ability; just two attacks. The first
is “Thunder Rod”, which costs [C] and allows you to look
at the top four cards of your deck and then attach any
[L] Energy you find there to Ampharos-EX
(itself). Other cards are shuffled back into your
deck. Only basic Lightning Energy cards
provide [L] in deck, so everything else will be returned
to the deck and the best you can do is four Energy; for
an attack this is good enough you might use it, even
benefit from it, but not so good that you should really
plan on doing so as a general strategy. The
second attack is “Sparking Tail” and it requires [LLCC]
to hit for 100 damage, with its effect text stating that
Weakness, Resistance and any other effects on the
opponent’s Active don’t apply to the damage being done.
This is a bit misleading because unless there has been
an inhouse revision, rulings have stressed that Weakness
and Resistance are considered separate game mechanics
from “attack effects”, while this wording makes them all
sound related. That is just a pet peeve though and
not relevant to the quality of the attack which is…
okay. It hits hard enough to take out typical
Safeguard Pokémon and ignoring all the other stuff is
nice but exploiting Weakness - as emphasized
earlier - is a big deal for Lightning-Types; not
applying Weakness is a big, hidden cost for the attack.
100 damage is the minimum I want to see on a four
Energy attack as well. The first attack is a
decent lead in to this one, though, and combined with
the rest of the card this is a solid deal.
Still
you shouldn’t bother with Ampharos-EX unless
you’re running M Ampharos-EX and Ampharos
Spirit Link; the latter is easy to remember as it is
simply the usual Spirit Link Pokémon Tool that
keeps the otherwise crippling Mega Evolution rules from
nerfing these big Pokémon. We reviewed M
Ampharos-EX
here
as our eighth place pick for the Top 15 cards of XY:
Ancient Origins. As a Lightning-Type Mega
Evolution with 220 HP Fighting Weakness, Metal
Resistance, a Retreat Cost of [CCC] and lacking an
Ancient Trait or Ability, it is a pretty natural
extension of the regular Ampharos-EX. The
similarities underscore similar strategies or confirm
some decisions for running the lower Stage: for example
as the Retreat Cost go up it becomes even more necessary
to run an effect to deal with Retreat Costs. The
lone attack is “Exavolt” which requires the same [LLCC].
This time though the base damage is 120 and the attack’s
text states you may choose to hit for both an
extra 50 damage (so 170 total) as well as Paralyze the
opponent’s Active, but doing this means the attack will
do 30 damage to M Ampharos-EX itself (as opposed
to doing no self-damage with the base 120).
The
only thing that has really changed since my review of
M Ampharos-EX is that I realize how poorly worded
parts of it were; I had to reread some spots multiple
times before I realized what I meant. Ouch. M
Ampharos-EX isn’t a totally worthless Mega
Evolution, but it suffers because while the attack
effect seems sweet, it is a bit self-contradictory; if
you are hitting so hard that you’ll 2HKO almost anything
in the game, that is when you’d want the guaranteed
Paralysis. When you’re hitting hard enough to OHKO
many things in the game, then the Paralysis is wasted at
those times, but you still suffer the 30 points of self
damage you would take when you were hitting something
that could survive to be Paralyzed. Paralysis is a
pretty potent effect, so I can understand why they
didn’t want to do a 120 with Paralysis/170 damage split
(and reduce or lose entirely the self-damage), but at
the same time it isn’t so strong of an effect that M
Ampharos-EX can confidently try and lock opponents.
Either you need several other effects to institute a “hardlock”
that is difficult (if not high improbable) to escape or
you have to settle for a softlock most decks running
Keldeo-EX + Float Stone can deal with… and in
the case of the former you get a much more difficult
setup that can misfire and potentially clash with itself
even when “working”.
So back
to Ampharos-EX; sometimes a Pokémon with a Mega
Evolution can be better than its Mega Evolution and see
play, or is good enough to compensate for a less
impressive Mega Evolution and get them both into decks.
I don’t see a lot of room for Ampharos-EX in
Expanded, and in Standard it mostly benefits from a lack
of other, better options. It is a marvelous pull
for Limited play; its Energy costs are flexible enough
that while you will still need to run
Lightning Energy, you could work it in with another
Type or two without overly straining things. More
importantly, if you don’t mind risking the Fighting-Type2 presence in this set, Ampharos-EX is otherwise a great pull
for a +39 build where it is your only Basic Pokémon (and
thus you have to open with it). Thunder Rod
should rarely fail to speed things up by at least a
turn (as the deck should be limited to mostly basic
Lightning Energy anyway, plus whatever lucky pulls
you got otherwise), while the effect of Sparkling Tail
can prevent awkward stalling while 2HKOing almost
everything else you could possibly encounter.
Ratings
Standard:
2/5
Expanded:
1.75/5
Limited:
4.8/5
Summary:
Ampharos-EX does serve a purpose beyond being a
stepping stone for M Ampharos-EX since it can
attack to self-accelerate Energy and/or be used to punch
through problematic protective effects, but it doesn’t
do such things well enough to be a strong attacker in
its own right, while M Ampharos-EX is at best
“good” in a field of “greats”, providing little added
incentive to run Ampharos-EX. Seems great
for Limited, though that is true of most basic
Pokémon-EX.
1
Not to be confused with Weakness based counters: I am
referring to detrimental effects that target a card
based on the subject’s Type.
2
This is something you’ll need to really consider: while
we skipped some of these Fighting-Types for actual
review, Limited is where they can shine and if you don’t
have a Flash Energy attached, are impossible for
a lone Ampharos-EX to defeat except due to a
misplay or improbable levels of bad luck on your
opponent’s part.
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