Pokemon Home

Pokedex

Price Guide Set List

Message Board

Pokemon GO Tips

Pokemon News

Featured Articles

Trading Card Game
- Price Guide
- Price Guide
- Card of the Day
- Professional Grading
- Killer Deck Reports
- Deck Garage
- William Hung
- Jason Klaczynski
- Jeremy's Deck Garage
- Johnny Blaze's Banter
- TCG Strategies
- Rulings Help
- Apprentice & Patch
- Apprentice League
- Spoilers & Translations
- Official Rules
- Featured Event Reports
- Top of the World
- An X-Act Science
- Error Cards
- Printable Checklist
- Places to Play

Nintendo Tips
- Red/Blue
- Yellow
- Gold & Silver
- Crystal
- Ruby & Sapphire
- Fire Red & Leaf Green
- Emerald
- SNAP
- Pinball
- TCG cart
- Stadium
- PuPuzzle League
- Pinball: Ruby/Sapphire
- Pokemon Coliseum
- Pokemon Box
- Pokemon Channel

GameBoy Help
- ClownMasters Fixes
- Groudon's Den
- Pokemon of the Week

E-Card Reader FAQ's
- Expedition
- Aquapolis
- Skyridge
- Construction Action Function
- EON Ticket Manual

Deck Garage
- Pokemaster's Pit Stop
- Kyle's Garage
- Ghostly Gengar

Cartoon/Anime
- Episode Listing
- Character Bios
- Movies & Videos
- What's a Pokemon?
- Video List
- DVD List

Featured Articles

Pojo's Toy Box

Books & Videos

Downloads

Advertise With Us
- Sponsors
- Links

Chat

About Us
Contact Us

Pojo's Pokémon Card of the Day

aroramage

You know, sometimes we just need to scrub off the grime and gunk of the old Stadiums and make way for newer ones. Just give them a good old deep cleaning treatment and then move forward with a shining new arena for combatants to take part in!  ...or we could just paint the card over.  Paint Roller does just that, wiping off the local Stadium with its paint and wrecking it completely. I guess that kinda means vandalism wins the day in this Stadium-heavy format. Not only that, but you also get to draw a card off of it - not too shabby! You could disrupt your opponent's strategy AND replace Paint Roller all in one! That's a pretty solid +1 in my opinion!  Of course, you could always just run a Stadium. That replaces your opponent's Stadium pretty easily.  I see this as being utilized as a techie card - something to boost the consistency of your own deck while disrupting your opponents, and with the way things are looking, it's going to definitely see play in a few decks. The toughest thing it'll face is the other cards that are vying for a spot in every deck - and there's a lot of draw support too now, so that only makes things more difficult!  But if you can spare the room, I'm sure Paint Roller will help out in the Stadium Wars that litter the format. Either that, or no one will run it cause they like smacking Stadiums down.  Rating  Standard: 3/5 (it may be a bit situational, but hey, it's still got its uses!)  Expanded: 3/5 (and besides, Stadiums are getting a lot of attention now! It's working out!)  Limited: 4.5/5 (there may be only 2 Stadiums here, but one of them damages Megas, and the other is FOREST OF GIANT PLANTS OH MY ARCEUS RUN THIS RUN THIS RUN THIS RUN THIS)  Arora Notealus: Seriously, that paint roller is literally painting the card over. What is this, some silly little joke on card games? Or maybe it's a dimensional painter that's blotting out the Stadium entirely!! THIS PAINT ROLLER IS THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS - LITERALLY!!  ...either that, or it's just a paint roller.  Next Time: WHOA, this Energy's getting a little...um...unsafe!

Otaku

Our second CotD for this week (we skipped Monday) is Paint Roller (XY: Ancient Origins 79/98), an Item that discards the current Stadium in play, then allows you to draw a card.  Yesterday’s subject ended up resulting in a fairly long review that I didn’t expect; today’s is a little more straightforward.  Why?  Well for starters this is an Item card (a subdivision of Trainers) and not a subdivision of a subdivision.  You’ve got general “Trainer” effects and Item specific effects that apply, and we are pretty used to that: Items are a commonly played form of Trainer.  This is probably because an Item only requires you have it in hand and can play it for some effect (including the chance of doing something, even if the card carries the risk of doing nothing).  No “Once per turn” clause or the like.  Some Items have built in costs, but Paint Roller just requires there be a Stadium card in play.  It doesn’t even require that it be yours or your opponent’s, just so long as it is there.  Stadiums aren’t guaranteed to be in play, but they are a frequent play (sometimes vital to a deck’s function) and as such this isn’t a huge burden.  Discarding a Stadium is easy… if you’ve got a Stadium with a different name in hand and haven’t already played a Stadium this turn.  Apart from that built in mechanic it gets a bit tricky and that is where Paint Roller may earn its keep.  For starters, it has an additional effect; you draw a card afterwards.  Don’t mistake this for “draw power”; while there is a slight chance of this backfiring because it is mandatory (again, like Lucky Helmet yesterday) you’re in total control so worse case scenario, you just won’t use it if you know that draw would make you lose next turn.  The main reason it is there is because discarding a Stadium can be handy (as I’ll explain) but it isn’t so useful as to justify being the only effect on a card.  Instead of something more difficult to balance out, Paint Roller simply replaces itself in your hand with the next card from the top of your deck; the only way it could be even lower impact is if it somehow didn’t count against your 60 card limit.  The other reason to consider it is that the “easy” way of discarding Stadiums isn’t always that easy and we’ve got a format where you want to avoid hand clutter so that you can use Shaymin-EX (XY: Roaring Skies 77/108, 106/108) and its Setup ability to keep your deck flowing.  Stadiums with the same name as the one in play are dead in hand.  Multiple Stadiums in your deck are an option but they can’t coexist in play at the same time, so they compete with each other.  We’ve got some fantastic Stadiums available right now so winning the Stadium war is important, but they are also at the point where it is hard to find something that benefits you significantly more than your opponent.  Let that last one sink in a bit; how often have you realized that you are hurting (or at least not helping) yourself and/or are helping your opponent too much to be good for you?  Possibly there is even a deck for which there is no good Stadium.  Stadium cards also have less (and less useful) support than Items (and Items don’t exactly have a lot of support dedicated to them): it might be niche but a card like Korrina can snag a Paint Roller to deal with an opponent’s Stadium even though it can’t get your own Stadium to drop instead.  Though I can’t think of a good example, there may even be a competitive deck that just doesn’t benefit enough from them to bother with its own Stadiums but still needs a way to deal with the opponent’s.  All of this leads to the best reason to run Paint Roller; as your “spare” Stadium.  Maybe it is being run in place of a fifth Stadium card (or fourth or sixth or whatever), but again controlling what Stadium is in play has been a big deal for a while now… and even before we had multiple good choices just being able to take out the opponent’s Stadium would have still made Paint Roller appealing.  I usually can’t justify running more than four Stadiums in a deck right now; I’m willing to run a split but more than four copies runs into that issue of cluttering your hand/slowing your deck down.  So when I’ve got some way of searching it out or recycling it, I’m trying out Paint Roller.  This can lead to a surprise “win” in the Stadium war as well, though if running Paint Roller becomes a common approach that won’t remain.  So try it in both Standard and Expanded, with Skyla making it a real possibility in the latter.  For Limited play it snags that somewhat misleading perfect score; it is a must run but that is because you should have the room.  Yes, even though I’ve said that for so many other cards - you aren’t likely to get more than a few of them at the same time.  While your opponent may be lacking a Stadium or only running one to counter the opponent’s if they get something critical (mostly Forest of Giant Plants), that need to counter means Paint Roller is a must.  Even if you are running a mostly (or all) Grass-Type deck, being able to drop Forest of Giant Plants, Evolve whatever you can, then discard that Stadium and draw a card is useful in general and shrewd if facing an opponent that also has Evolving Grass-Types.  Ratings  Standard: 3.35/5  Expanded: 3.5/5  Limited: 5/5  Summary: Yet another solid Trainer card that can be useful to quite a few decks but possibly not useful enough to see play in most of them, Paint Roller is just a little above the pack.  Paint Roller did impress the CotD crew a little; while it didn’t score high enough to make the Top 15, it did receive a total of five points from voting, which means it would have been (is?) our 17th place pick for the top cards of its set.  I want to make a bold prediction that once Skyla is back, this will become another staple single but even before the rotation, there were so many similar Items that I won’t; I’ll just let that seeming flip flop serve as a good indicator of how good this card is and isn’t.