aroramage |
Finally we come to Aerodactyl, the
winged terror of the skies, the fearsome predator of the
ancient past, and the first Normal-typed Fossil/Restored
Pokemon...ever! ...well, okay, not ever ever,
technically Colorless and all that, but still,
Aerodactyl is the first Restored Pokemon to have
Colorless as his typing, even if previous iterations
have him have shared that typing at one point.
That all being said, he's also the
easiest Restored Pokemon to get out, as either Omastar
or his own Old Amber Aerodactyl will retrieve him with
ease...the latter less so than the former, but them's
the breaks. The real question here is if he's worth
bringing out, and given that he starts off with 120 HP
and a vanilla 1-for-30 strike, the odds aren't looking
in his favor.
But then something unusual happens,
and Aerodactyl goes from modest Bite to the obscenely
powerful Jet Draft. Normally a 2-for-120 strike would be
crazy enough on its own, already viable enough to 2HKO
even most Megas, but then it gets better with the
addition of the effect to discard a Special Energy
attached to the opponent's Active Pokemon! This gets rid
of DCE, Strong Energy, and even Double Dragon Energy off
of some of the more troublesome decks of the format,
while being fueled by a single DCE itself, making
Aerodactyl a potentially viable threat!
I say potentially though,
considering how difficult it is to get him out in the
first place. He may be the easiest Restored Pokemon to
work with, outside of using Maxie's/Archie's with
Kabutops/Omastar respectively to get them out, but
that's about all he's got going for him - you'll need to
have at least set up Omastar to get him out from your
deck, otherwise good luck working around Old Amber
Aerodactyl and recycling it with your Fossil Excavation
Kit.
But if you can get Aerodactyl to
come out, you can bet he'll put in some good work
against your opponent before getting KO'd for having the
magic number as his HP score. If only he had even 10
more HP...
Rating
Standard: 2.5/5 (arguably the most
powerful but definitely the most accessible of the new
Restored Pokemon)
Expanded: 2.5/5 (I dunno what else
to say about him - if you play Restored, you oughta be
running Aerodactyl)
Limited: 3/5 (and hey, at least you
can ATTEMPT to play him in Limited successfully)
Arora Notealus: And that brings us
to the rolling boulder that ends our journey into the
ruins of the ancient past. We may not have gotten that
golden idol we were looking for, but at least we know
where all these Restored Pokemon belong............in a
museum.
Weekend Thought: What Restored
Pokemon or support from this week got you the most
excited to unearth? Brushing off any of those ancient
cards you had lying around, or are you just letting them
sit in the dirt? Just saying, they're probably not gonna
change into oil for a loooooooooong time...long time.
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Otaku |
We finish the week with Aerodactyl (XY: Fates
Collide 53/108). This is a Colorless Type
Pokémon; no enjoying double damage from Weakness but at
least no annoying -20 from Resistance. In terms of
support the Colorless Type has Altaria (XY:
Roaring Skies 74/108; XY: Black Star Promos
XY46) to cancel out their Weakness, Aspertia City Gym
to gain +20 HP (Expanded only), and Winona to
search out three of them at a time from the deck.
Their true strength comes from the fact that most (but
not all) Colorless Type Pokémon will have just Colorless
Energy requirements making them easy to slip into the
majority of decks. There are actually two Type
specific counters for Colorless Types, with attacks that
hit Colorless Type Pokémon for added damage:
Exeggutor (XY: Roaring Skies 2/108) and
Haxorus (BW: Dragon Vault 16/20).
Neither have seen success in competitive play and they
have indeed been available in formats where Colorless
Pokémon were part of strong, popular decks. As
usual, the narrow focus just isn’t worth it.
Before I move on, part of me really wishes Aerodactyl
had been given its other TCG appropriate Typing of
Fighting, based on its video game Type being
Rock/Flying. As I mentioned
earlier this week
the Fighting Type has some of if not the best Type
support in the game and as we are about to see, it may
have been quite useful for this card, but even if not
just exploiting Fighting Weakness would have been worth
it.
Aerodactyl
is a Restored Pokémon, and that is actually a step up
from the rest of the Pokémon this week. While I’ve
been critical of the Stage all week, Evolving from a
Restored Pokémon is even worse than being one. If
you skipped the rest of the reviews from earlier this
week, Restored Pokémon are a Stage that can only be put
into play by other card effects. Each one gets a
dedicated Item (based on the card name) that lets you
look at the bottom seven cards of your deck and then
if you find any copies of that Pokémon there, you
may select one and Bench it. This is even
less reliable than it sounds. Max Elixir has had
some success and it only looks at the top six cards of
your deck. While these Fossil Items look at
one more card, you only have up to four targets in your
entire deck. Most builds I see using Max Elixir
include at least double that amount of Basic Energy
cards. There are two pieces of Restored Pokémon
Stage support. In Expanded you have Twist
Mountain, which allows you to Bench a Restored
Pokémon from hand. It sounds better than it is:
not only does it require a coin flip (“tails fails”) but
it can only be used once per turn. Omastar
(reviewed
Wednesday)
has the Ability Restoring Beam which lets you both
search out and Bench a Restored Pokémon from hand once
per turn. Effects meant to benefit a particular
Stage won’t help help Restored Pokémon, but their
counters won’t affect Restored Pokémon either. In
fact, they are neither Basic Pokémon nor are they
Evolutions, so Aerodactyl can attack through the
effects of things like “Flash Ray” (Jolteon-EX)
and “Crystal Ray” (Glaceon-EX).
Aerodactyl
has 120 HP; if it were a Basic this would be very good
and pretty good for a Stage 1. The max printed
score for a regular Basic is 140, only just set by
Snorlax (XY: Fates Collide 77/124).
Stage 1 record holder Wailord (BW: Dragons
Exalted 26/124) far outstrips and has been out for
years, but hasn’t been used for years, with the next
best being a few with 150. In terms of actual
function, 120 HP is in the hazy area where odds of
surviving a hit or being OHKO’d are about even.
Except when hit by Weakness, in which case it is an easy
OHKO. The Lightning Weakness on this card seems to
be moderate (instead of a severe). It will enable
attackers like Jolteon-EX, M Manectric-EX,
and regular Manectric-EX to score a OHKO without
additional buffs, as well as a few less common
attackers. Not good, but right now that is far
better than Darkness or Fighting Weakness. Aerodactyl
actually has Fighting Resistance! There are tricks
to allow any Type to ignore Resistance, but the main
thing is the Fighting Type has access to a variety of
buffs to just overwhelm it. Still an effective 140
HP is still better than the real 120 against them. Aerodactyl
also enjoys a perfect free Retreat Cost; this
means once you get it into play it can function as a
pivot Pokémon, being promoted up front between turns, or
when you need something to immediately retreat again
(such as helping another Pokémon shake an attack
effect).
Aerodactyl
has two attacks, “Bite” and “Jet Draft”. Bite is a
vanilla 30 for [C]; not a reason to run the card but
better than nothing (and if this had been a Fighting
Type, it actually could have been useful). Jet
Draft only requires [CC] so with most forms of Energy
acceleration - including good ol’ Double Colorless
Energy - you can just skip directly to it. It
does 120 while discarding a Special Energy attached to
your opponent’s Active (assuming there is one).
There are some situations where you actually would
not want to discard a Special Energy from the
opponent’s Active, but it is somewhere between niche and
obscure so I only mention it to be thorough. Jet
Draft is a great attack and might be even better if we
had some easy damage bonuses and a Supporter that could
put Aerodactyl directly into play from the
discard pile. As is, you can still try to build up
Jet Draft into OHKO range, but it might be better to
just have a 2HKO attacker worth a single Prize. I
am sure the goal in making it a Colorless Type was to
diversify: Omastar and Kabutops are both Rock/Water in
the video games and so their cards each took one of the
corresponding TCG Types. Jet Draft really makes me
wish it was a Fighting Type, though.
The specific Item that puts this Pokémon into play is
Old Amber Aerodactyl, which works like all the
Fossil Items I described as a group earlier.
Unlike the rest of the cards this week, there is one
other Aerodactyl in the legal card pool, at least
for Expanded: Aerodactyl (BW: Dark Explorers
53/108). It is a Fighting Type Restored Pokémon
with 90 HP, Grass Weakness, no Resistance, Retreat Cost
[C], an Ability, and an attack. The Ability is
“Ancient Scream” and it increases the damage the attacks
of your Pokémon do to Active Pokémon (that includes your
own Actives as well) before applying Weakness and
Resistance. For [CCC] it can use “Wing Attack” to
do 40 damage, which is better than nothing but was still
badly underpowered at the time. We actually looked
at this card
here
a little over four years ago and we were far, far too
optimistic about it. I don’t know if it was
because Ability lock and Item lock weren’t dominant
strategies at the time or simply because we didn’t
realize how difficult it was to make use of Restored
Pokémon. Probably a little of each; so on paper it
looked like you could try to spam some Items to get a
permanent (until KO’d) +10 damage to your attacks, maybe
more if you were exceptionally lucky. It never
panned out and so I’d forgotten about it until I went to
write this review, hence not bringing it up earlier this
week. I don’t think it is worth the +10 bonus,
unless you figure out a deck that already uses
Omastar and really does need just 10 more damage.
Probably not as an Omastar/Omastar BREAK
deck will probably want today’s Aerodactyl as a
searchable beatstick for Restoring Beam more than a +10
damage bonus. While this is the deck idea to which
I keep returning, don’t mistake it as a serious
suggestion for competitive play. I still am
uncertain what else to run with them as you’ll need
at least one Basic to include in the deck for it to be
legal, and I don’t know if how long it has been since
I’ve seen a serious, competitive deck perform well with
less than six Basics (and six was an exception: 10 is
the usual minimum with 12 being preferred). At
first I thought it would fare worse in Expanded for the
usual reason (more competition/counters) but here
Aerodactyl has access to something important.
No, not Twist Mountain (though that is an
option), but Hypnotoxic Laser, Silver Bangle,
and Virbank City Gym. You could run a split
gym but the main thing is that the combo I just
mentioned, capable of working with many other cards,
would allow Aerodactyl to effectively OHKO any
Pokémon-EX with 180 or less HP (and anything else with
150 or less). In Standard, one might run
Aerodactyl because it can take out certain
nuisances, though being a Restored Pokémon means you’ll
get a far worse return for what would otherwise be a
pivot Pokémon that was a solid beatstick and could
discard Special Energy at the same time it hit for 120
damage.
In Limited play Aerodactyl could be a decent
pull, with the main issue (as expected) being the need
to pull at least one Old Amber Aerodactyl.
While there is still a serious risk you’ll draw into
Aerodactyl without a way to shuffle it back into
your deck (and thus it will be dead in hand), just like
the other Restored Pokémon in this set (Kabuto
and Omanyte), this card fares much better for a
few reasons. First you’re not relying on any other
specific cards after that point, and second, its Retreat
Cost and attacks become better here. Bite finally
has a purpose as you probably won’t have a Double
Colorless Energy handy, and though Jet Draft is less
likely to discard a Special Energy here (Double
Colorless Energy and Strong Energy are in
this set!), average HP scores should be lower and thus
Jet Draft goes from scoring a reliable 2HKO to a likely
OHKO.
Ratings
Standard:
2.25/5
Expanded:
2.25/5
Limited:
3.5/5
Summary:
Aerodactyl is almost a worthwhile Restored
Pokémon. If it wasn’t so difficult to stream them
then it could be a solid attacker, good but not great.
I had this as my 11th place pick, giving it over half
its nine voting points. Why did I rank it so high?
I incorrectly remembered the effect of Fossil
Researcher as working with any Restored Pokémon,
instead of just Amaura and Tyrunt. A
Supporter for two 120 HP attackers that could run off
Double Colorless Energy seemed good-but-not great,
but I guess was actually too good to be true.
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