aroramage |
Sylveon...also looks oddly
familiar. 170 HP, 2 attacks that are 2 Energy and 3
Energy apiece...right down to the 2-cost Retreat! At
least the Fairy Typing still generously gives her a Dark
Resistance.
On top of that, Dress Up is
completely Colorless in cost! Course, it's only a
2-for-30 strike (sounds...familiar?). Additionally, it
can get an extra 30 damage if there's a Tool attached to
it! That's not that bad, especially if you put Muscle
Band or Fighting Fury Belt on her - then she's dealing
70-80 damage for only 2 Energy! Not too bad, Sylveon!
Then there's Precious Ribbon, a
nifty 3-for-100 damage. Not that bad, and Sylveon-EX can
move her Fairy Energy off to another Pokemon to charge
them up while also recovering 50 HP if she does so!
Prepping your Pokemon just in case Sylveon-EX is pretty
good, and healing 50 HP isn't too bad on the scale of
healing honestly. All in all, it's pretty neat!
...though that doesn't mean Sylveon-EX
is exceptional. Again, not a bad card - probably one of
the better Eeveelution-EXs - but not one of the absolute
best EX. There's nothing really game-breaking about
Sylveon-EX like there have been on EX cards in the past.
The Tool bonus on Dress Up just makes her more offensive
while Precious Ribbon, while dealing more damage, is
almost more defensive in its capabilities and supportive
of anything that can take her place. And Sylveon-EX does
need those extra Tools to deal enough good damage all
around.
So in short, take another look at
Sylveon-EX for her prowess as a good EX, but don't
expect her to be topping tournaments solo.
Rating
Standard: 3/5 (an all-around good
EX that does what it can do fairly well)
Expanded: 3/5 (it's just hard to
gauge what more she can do without the right support of
her own)
Limited: 3.5/5 (and on her own?
well, she'd at least do well in Limited)
Arora Notealus: I do like the
Eeveelutions all getting their own EX cards. I wonder if
they'll continue pumping out new EXs until they start
hitting the lower end...Kricketune-EX? Chatot-EX?
Luvdisc-EX? I guess they can't hit the absolute bottom,
but at least get me Snorlax-EX and Slaking-EX!
Next Time: Speaking of fire!!...I
was a day late on that one.
|
Otaku |
Sylveon-EX
(Generations RC21/RC32, RC32/R32) is our third
review this week. This time we are looking at a
Fairy Type, a Type which currently can only strike
Weakness against XY-era Dragon Types, but at least
nothing is Fairy Resistant. If there are any
explicitly anti-Fairy Type cards, I’m missing them.
It is easier to find the Fairy Type support, though
there still isn’t a lot of it and the effects that
specifically reference Fairy Type Pokémon aren’t too
thrilling. When it comes to manipulating [Y]
Energy, there we get some cards that can really help the
Fairy Type, usually better than they can help other
Types. Xerneas (XY 96/146; XY: Black
Star Promos XY05) is used as attack based Energy
acceleration, Aromatisse (XY 93/146) to
move [Y] Energy around, and Fairy Garden to zero
out the Retreat Costs of Pokémon with a source of [Y]
Energy attached. Not the most thrilling of Types,
but it definitely isn’t bad. Being a Pokémon-EX
means giving up an extra Prize when KOed while being
explicitly targeted by some detrimental effects and
excluded from a few beneficial ones. This is
usually offset by having better attributes (usually HP)
and/or effects, but the previous three things I
mentioned are guaranteed by the premise of being a
Pokémon-EX or the card pool while those benefits vary
from card to card. There is one other bonus that
applies to Pokémon which get the Pokémon-EX treatment
and are Evolutions (but not Mega Evolutions): they get
to be Basic Pokémon!
Being a Basic Pokémon is the best; yes there are some
potent anti-Basic Pokémon effects but the Basic Pokémon
support, inherent strengths of requiring less time
(and/or cards) to be put into play, and improved synergy
with various card effects (when compared with other
Stages) has created a tremendous advantage for this
Stage over all others. Sylveon-EX does cash in
the the expected HP boost, possessing 170 HP; the
regular versions of Sylveon only have 90 HP. 170
is the lower of the two typical HP scores for Basic
Pokémon-EX, but is still good and sturdy. Nothing
is safe from being OHKOed, and many decks are shooting
for this amount or more. That isn’t the same as
rapidly and reliably doing 170+ damage, so you’ll still
have good odds of surviving a hit, especially against a
less than complete setup and of course the decks focused
more on effects than attacks. The Metal Weakness
on Sylveon-EX isn’t great, but it might be one of
the less harmful Weaknesses to have right now; there are
some Metal Type decks that are still doing well, but
they aren’t overly prominent. Sylveon-EX has
Darkness Resistance, a nice change of pace from the
previous two subjects. This may even end up with
some synergy with one of the card’s attacks, but more on
that later. The Retreat Cost of [CC] is low enough
you can probably manage if you have to pay it at full
price, but high enough it is better if you can avoid
doing so.
Sylveon-EX
has two attacks. The first is “Dress Up”, which
costs [CC] and does 30 damage, plus an additional 30
damage if Sylveon-EX has a Pokémon Tool attached
to it. 30 for two is poor but 60 for two is solid, and
it is quite likely you’ll want a Pokémon Tool attached
to Sylveon-EX anyway. Again as a change of
pace from the previous two Pokémon-EX Eeveelutions,
Dress Up can be powered by any Energy, which means that
Double Colorless Energy can provide an instant
boost from “zero” to “attacking”. The second
attack is “Precious Ribbon”, which costs [YYC]. It
does 100 damage and then moves a [Y] Energy from
Sylveon-EX to one of your Benched Pokémon.
Assuming you can do that, you’ll heal 50 damage from
that Pokémon. If you have no Bench this effect
won’t trigger, but if you have a target that cannot
receive the Energy (such as a Safeguard Pokémon) then it
will attempt to move the Energy, fail, and the Energy
will be discarded. 100 for three isn’t great but it’s
reasonably good; without boosts you’ll still easily
score 2HKOs against similarly sized Pokémon-EX and with
a simple Muscle Band you’ll either OHKO or 2HKO
anything that isn’t protected, buffed, or Wailord-EX.
The healing isn’t great but it isn’t bad, and moving an
Energy to the Bench can be a benefit or a drawback, as
explained above. The main concern is that it costs
[YYC] instead of [YCC], so you know how Dress Up can use
Double Colorless Energy? Probably not the
best idea.
No other Sylveon-EX to compare or compete with,
and we know there are some amazing Basic Pokémon-EX
beatsticks with which Sylveon-EX cannot hope to
compete, so let us look at other Fairy Type Basic
Pokémon-EX beatsticks. Yet again, the situation is
different from that of Leafeon-EX and Vaporeon-EX;
the Fairy Type is still pretty new so there just aren’t
as many Fairy Type Basic Pokémon-EX to compete with, let
alone good ones. Most just aren’t great at
attacking or at least require enough effort to set up
and keep going, there is an opening for something else.
Thanks to its second attack, though, Sylveon-EX
can actually work with the worthwhile options (or
anything else that can make use of [Y] Energy).
Fairy Transfer decks can take advantage of Precious
Ribbon to reduce the loss of Energy should your attacker
be KOed and easily exploit the healing effect.
Some have been experimenting with Sylveon-EX and
some of the other solid Fairy Type attackers (not sure
which would actually count as that) to get a Fairy Type
deck that does not run Aromatisse for
Fairy Transfer, but I haven’t tried it, nor have I seen
or heard of it working. Still, at least it is
something. This is also a great pull for Limited,
either run on its own or alongside other Pokémon, though
it isn’t like you’ll have much of a chance of using
Generations for a Limited event in the first place.
Ratings
Standard:
3/5
Expanded:
2.75/5
Limited:
4.35/5
Summary:
Sylveon-EX is a solid card, though I worry I’m
overrating it a bit just because it seems like a fresh
of breath air compared to the last two reviews.
Solid attributes and two more-or-less good attacks are
appreciated, especially when not being released
into a crowded field.
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