aroramage |
Long ago in an ancient time, three
great statues were erected and brought to life, each
composed of one of three elements: metal, ice, and rock.
Only one has been graced with the power of the legendary
EX, and now the second great golem is graced with the
greatness of EX-dom! Ladies and gents, Regirock-EX!
Regirock-EX carries over the 180 HP
score of most EX and brings an Ability and an attack to
the table. Bedrock Press isn't terribly exciting, at
3-for-100 and the effect of reducing damage by 20. Not
to say that's a bad attack, honestly it's one of the
better ones I know of, but all things considered it's
not what makes Regirock-EX so exciting to talk about.
No, that belongs to his Ability of course, Regi Power.
Aptly named, Regi Power gives
Regirock-EX the power to tack on an extra 10 damage to
every Fighting Pokemon's damage score, outside of any
Regirock-EX. Sounds familiar, right? Well it should,
since Deoxys-EX (PLF) had the exact same Ability for
Team Plasma Pokemon! This made Plasma decks a bit more
troublesome to deal with, as back in those days they had
to deal with Plasma's power and the threat of HTLBank.
There is one major difference
between Regirock-EX and Deoxys-EX though, and that's
mainly in what he supports. Deoxys-EX only helped out a
certain kind of Pokemon, the blue-bordered Team Plasma
Pokemon, whereas Regirock-EX helps out Fighting-types.
And if there's one thing about Fighting-types that
everyone knows, it's that they are ALL about that damage
boosting! Strong Energy, Fighting Stadium, and now
Regirock-EX!
Regirock-EX is going to do a lot
for Fighting decks, so if you're a big Fighter, bring
along anywhere from 3-4 of this guy, cause every little
bit counts!
Rating
Standard: 4.5/5 (the power Regirock-EX
brings is no doubt the best part about him, even if he
won't bring it to himself)
Expanded: 4.5/5 (the power...THE
POWER!!)
Limited: 5/5 (if you're lucky
enough to pull Regirock-EX, you should probably run him
with any Fighting types you've got!)
Arora Notealus: We're entering
another bit of aggressive deck building - rejoice! Or
flail about with me as we try and figure out how to live
in the new world. Personally, I welcome our new Regi-Overlords.
Weekend Thought: Do you agree with
our Top 10 list? Think some cards should have been
higher? Think some of them ought to be lower? Think
there's some that should have been on the list while
others taken off? Who knows what the future holds, but
one thing's for sure - there's going to be some
interesting decks in these first few weeks.
|
Otaku |
According to the collective efforts of the Card of the
Day crew here at Pojo, the number one best card from
XY: Fates Collide is… Regirock-EX (XY:Fates
Collide 43/124)! We’ve already mentioned it a
few times in the other reviews leading up to today, and
as I am usually not the first listed review, you’ve also
probably already had much shorter explanations given,
but we are still going to run through it all so that you
know exactly what it is we have here.
The Fighting Type is the best Type for a Pokémon to be
right now. Almost everything a Type can have going
for it, Fighting does: Weakness to the Fighting Type is
found on most Colorless Types, nearly all Darkness
Types, and nearly all Lightning Types. That would
be good in general, but Fighting Types gain access to a
lot of direct support, which includes tricks to boost
damage like Fighting Stadium, Strong Energy
and of course Regirock-EX itself now; already
explosive starts become OHKOs when Weakness is involved.
Additional support comes in the form of cards like
Korrina to provide both Pokémon and Item search at
the same time, Focus Sash for when you do need to
think more defensively by potentially denying the
opponent a OHKO, and Carbink BREAK if you can
hold off on unleashing your really big attacks for a few
turns to instead do less damage while attaching Energy
from your discard. Less direct is Maxie’s
Hidden Ball Trick as while it doesn’t do Regirock-EX
a lot of good (still a legal target though) it makes
Evolved Fighting Types more competitive and better able
to use Regirock-EX, Scorched Earth to help
set up for Carbink BREAK while providing a little
extra draw power, and a plethora of potent pugilists for
Regirock-EX to power up. The minimal
drawbacks are that while “no Resistance” is the most
common, next after that is Fighting Resistance and while
-20 damage isn’t much it does matter in a tight
situation, and (from what I can find) two anti-Fighting
Type cards: Cryogonal (BW: Noble Victories
32/101) and Walrein (XY: Primal Clash
48/160). They simply have attacks that hit
Fighting Types a bit harder, which hasn’t been enough
for them to see competitive play.
Being a Pokémon-EX on the other hand is mostly
drawbacks, at least for what is guaranteed; unless a
specific Pokémon-EX includes something to counteract it,
they always give up an extra Prize when KOed (as per
rules text on each Pokémon-EX), are specifically
targeted and countered in some capacity by several cards
(well established in the card pool), and they cannot
make use of certain otherwise beneficial cards (less
numerous but still already present in the card pool).
This is why the Pokémon-EX that not only see competitive
play but often dominate the metagame tend to have good
(if not great) attributes and effects. For
attributes, this usually manifests with the HP. Regirock-EX
enjoys 180 HP, the higher of the two typical amounts for
Basic Pokémon-EX. This is 60 or 70 higher than the
two most recent “regular” Regirock cards and will
make Regirock-EX an unlikely KO. In this
case, that means the decks that are geared for OHKOs
will still manage it, those focused on attacking for
effects or spread won’t, and most in the middle will be
have the capacity but not to score a OHKO rapidly,
regularly, or reliably.
I was a bit surprised to see Grass Weakness on this
card. The short (by my standards) version is that
video game Regirock are Rock Types, which are Fighting,
Ground, Steel, Water, and Grass Weak. I thought
the TCG had moved towards standardizing the Rock Type
based TCG Fighting Type Pokémon with Water Weakness but
I appear to have been mistaken. The Metal Weakness
translates directly from the Steel, and would have been
both interesting and potentially a bit safer; no
Weakness is the only safe one, but with 180 HP there
will be some instances where Grass Weakness will matter,
though it mostly means a OHKO with less resources
required than without and might be more relevant for
enabling supporting Pokémon like Virizion-EX to
manage a 2HKO instead of a 4HKO. Regirock-EX has
no Resistance, which is typical so I won’t be docking
points. It actually has four in the video games
(Normal, Flying, Poison, and Fire) though, while I get
skipping Psychic since it includes not only Poison but
video game Psychic and Ghost Types, I can only assume it
is the aversion to having anything Colorless or Fire
Resistant causing either of those to be excluded
(Colorless is Normal plus Flying). The Retreat
Cost of [CCC] is chunky; make sure you have an out to
avoid paying it, or at least paying it at full price.
It does allow Regirock-EX to use Heavy Ball
and Heavy Boots, and Heavy Ball may
actually prove relevant.
Regirock-EX
made the list for its Ability “Regi Power” that
increases the damage your Fighting Pokémon do by 10.
The attack specifically states it does not increase the
damage done by cards named Regirock-EX.
Especially for long time players, it can be easy to
forget this does not just apply to that
particular copy of Regirock-EX, but any and all
cards named Regirock-EX. So even if you
have four it play, they can’t help each other out, only
Fighting Types with a different name. Also well
worth noting is that this boost applies before
Weakness and Resistance, which is how it generally works
when the boost happens because of an effect on the
attacking Pokémon. It means against Fighting Weak
Pokémon you get an effective +20 damage, and against
Fighting Resistance you have a better chance of punching
through. Regirock-EX does have a single attack
as well, called “Bedrock Press”. Perhaps showing
my age, that sounds like a Flintstones newspaper
to me. The attack requires [FFF] and does 100
damage, while reducing the damage Regirock-EX
(that is, “this Pokémon”) takes during your opponent’s
next turn by 20 after Weakness and Resistance.
The damage and effect are at best adequate for what you
are investing, but underwhelming is far better than
something blatantly overpriced. If you use it,
besides needing to remember Regi Power can’t boost it,
you also need to remember that with Weakness applying
first, you’re only effectively reducing the damage from
Grass Types by 10.
There are no other cards named Regirock-EX; I’ll
use this as an excuse to remind players who are
experimenting with older cards that Regirock-ex (EX:
Hidden Legends 98/101) and Regirock-ex (EX:
Emerald 99/106) are considered to have different
names: capitalization matters. If you are
really new to the game, so does the “-EX” suffix in
general: Regirock (XY: Black Star Promos
XY49) and Regirock (XY: Ancient Origins
40/98) also are totally separate cards from Regirock-EX
as far as the TCG is concerned. You could run four
Regirock-EX alongside four copies of either
Regirock (or a combination of those two), and in
Unlimited you could even run four copies either
Regirock-ex (or a combination of those) as well.
Not something I expect would do all that well in
Unlimited play, where last I checked there were still
plenty of decks that could win first turn even without
attacking, but it does bring us to an important point
for all Fighting Type cards that are still legal in the
Expanded and Standard card pools; it is time to give
them a look again. Most are not going to get
enough of a boost to matter, or even if it does matter
running them in a competitive deck precludes room for
Regirock-EX (either due to Bench space, specific
deck requirements, or both).
Regirock
(XY: Black Star Promos XY49) provides an example
of something that would like to increase its damage but
which can’t afford to have Regirock-EX on the
Bench. Thanks to Puzzle of Time, without
relying on having some other Pokémon in play or a coin
flip, you may now recycle your Ace Spec card twice
during a match. Regirock (XY: Black Star
Promos XY49) has the Ancient Trait “Ω Barrier” so
both it, the Energy attached to it, and any Pokémon
Tools attached to it are protected from the effects of
your opponent’s Trainers that are not put into play.
This means you can load Regirock up with
Strong Energy, slap a Focus Sash on it, and
barring a few non-general tricks, your opponent cannot
OHKO your Regirock and also cannot easily get rid
of anything attached to it. You try to open with a
Wobbuffet (XY: Phantom Forces 36/119;
Generations RC11/RC32), maybe include Robo
Substitute if you need another punching bag to feed
your opponent, and once you get started Regirock
tries to swing for a OHKO and whether it succeeds or
fails, you Scramble Switch all that Energy onto
the next Regirock, heal the original, and repeat.
It has a very slow set up and I don’t know if it will
finally graduate into a competitive archetype
(retroactively becoming an official rogue deck) by
winning or at least placing well at an event, or if the
only reason people know about it is because it is a
tricky match even if you know it is coming and difficult
if you blindly stumble into it so it has received some
hype. What I do know is that I wanted to share it
with our readers and it ended up being a good example of
a deck that would love the damage boost, but just
cannot afford to have Regirock-EX on the
Bench. The entire point is that once the deck gets
going, there is nothing your opponent can Lysandre
up front for a KO.
Where it should work are already strong attackers that
can spare the Bench space. Landorus-EX,
Lucario-EX, the new Zygarde-EX; all of these
make sense to run with Regirock-EX sitting on the
Bench, added to the pile of damage buffs. For the
single Energy strikes, this is mostly a matter of
ensuring the 2HKO against bigger targets, though a few
cards now fall into OHKO range that did not before.
The bigger attacks though can finally rise to the “OHKO
everything” level. Well, everything but
cards like Jolteon-EX if it just used “Flash
Ray”. It is also important to remember that not
every deck will need to shoot for four copies on the
Bench. Think back to Deoxys-EX; while you
had some Plasma Decks that did want to get four copies
to the field ASAP, some just needed one or two in order
to ensure big attackers their OHKO against Mega
Evolutions. With Carbink BREAK for Energy
acceleration and Maxie’s Hidden Ball Trick to
allow Evolutions to hit the field faster, a lot of decks
that were near misses, functional but not competitive
enough to reliably top cut, are worth another try.
For Limited play, this can really do wonders if you have
one of the Evolution packs that include Fighting Types.
If you get no other Fighting Types worth boosting, the
question is whether your deck can still make enough room
for enough basic Fighting Energy for you to be
able to afford Bedrock Press. If Everything else
has mostly Colorless costs it is plausible, but much
less appealing. You might consider running it
completely on its own; the bad news is that your
opponent will get two turns to attack Regirock-EX
without any fear of retaliation. The good news is
that after you get Bedrock Press up and running you’ll
take 20 less damage while doing 100 per turn. You
only play with four Prizes instead of the usual six in
Limited; if your opponent isn’t able to set up an
Evolution or their own big Basic during that time,
you’ve probably secured the win by then. The real
risk is your opponent also building a deck around
a lucky big, Basic Pokémon-EX pull; Zygarde-EX is
not something you want to see on your opponent’s field,
especially as his or her opening Basic.
Ratings
Standard:
4/5
Expanded:
4/5
Limited:
4.5/5
Summary:
Regirock-EX has such broad usage within the
Fighting Type that I found it easier to give an example
of a Fighting deck that could not make good use of it
instead of trying to focus on the ones that could.
This card is like Deoxys-EX, except instead of
working with the new gimmick (at the time Team Plasma
cards) it works with a Pokémon Type that already has so
much going for it. Unless we get another major
instance of power or HP creep so that it no longer can
speed up KOs, we should be seeing lots of it.
Did it deserve to be the number one pick? It
definitely earned the most voting points at 34, but that
amount is actually about what it would have earned if
everyone had also ranked it as their fourth or fifth
place choice. In fact I did rank it fifth on my
own list. Being an effective Bench-sitter isn’t
glamorous, and bumping damage by 10 isn’t overly
creative or exciting, but it is obviously good. So
obvious that this was the card where we all not only
agree, but at a higher level than any other card, though
Carbink BREAK came close. So while not
thrilling, that does seem like a satisfactory conclusion
for the list. Regirock-EX is probably the only
card on this list where I recommend getting a full four
(and where the others might agree).
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