aroramage |
Welcome back from Memorial Day
weekend everybody! Hope you enjoyed hanging out with
family and eating BBQ and what-not! I dunno what you do,
but I do know about some cards, so let's talk today
about Tyranitar!
Last we saw of him, he was
terrorizing the EX scene as Tyranitar-EX and,
subsequently, M Tyranitar-EX. I'm not saying he topped
anything, but there were probably a few victims to the
might of the Destroyer King. Now though, Tyranitar takes
a step back from the EX throne and sits upon the Stage 2
castle, waiting for his next time to shine.
Course that doesn't mean he's going
to sit down without a fight. Tyranitar still demands to
be king of the mountain, and for a whopping 5 Energy,
he'll unleash the Dark Mountain on your foes! Already it
starts off at 150 damage, but it also discards the top
two cards of your deck. What does that mean? Well, if
there wasn't more to this card, it'd just be
shenanigans. Who'd want an attack that's basically 30
damage per Energy that also gets rid of two
cards?...well, some people still might, but Tyranitar
offers them incentive for it, for if they end up
discarding Supporters because of it, he'll boost the
power of Dark Mountain even more by 50 damage for each
one! Astounding, and certainly powerful if you've got a
lot of Supporters.
...not that I imagine most decks
run so many Supporters, but that's its own issue.
Let's just address the elephant in
the room though: how do we get 5 Energy onto Tyranitar?
And more than that, how do we get it all to be Dark?
It's not like he's got Hydreigon (NVI)'s Ability to
change any Energy into Dark Energy that gets attached!
Well, Tyranitar may not have Hydreigon's Ability, but he
does have one of his own: Raging Roar! When you play him
down from your hand to evolve a Pokemon, he gets to grab
out Dark Energy from your discard pile equal to the
number of Prize cards your opponent has taken!
...wait a minute...
As you can see, there are a couple
of fundamental problems with Tyranitar here. For one,
his Ability usually sticks you out on the losing end.
Not to say that your opponent will be at 5 Prizes every
time you put Tyranitar down, but to really get good
mileage out of his Ability, your opponent will probably
need to take 2-3 Prizes to make him worthwhile. And
that's considering you get those Dark Energy into the
discard first - a Battle Compressor or Sycamore will do
wonders here. Course you may want to keep Sycamore in
the deck as best you can, as the more Supporters
Tyranitar can hit, the better Dark Mountain becomes.
There's a lot of potential, but
Tyranitar will not accept any other major attacker in
his deck...well, maybe one or two...
Rating
Standard: 2.5/5 (he's very
demanding, as is the nature of Tyranitar)
Expanded: 3/5 (but he could be
potentially powerful in the right hands)
Limited: 3.5/5 (hopefully he's
glorious even in Limited)
Arora Notealus: If big bulky
powerful Pokemon like Tyranitar and Charizard ever get a
good enough card to become competitive on top of being
awesome to look at, who knows what will happen to the
world of the card game...
Next Time: SKREEEEEEEEEEEE
|
Otaku |
Welcome to a
three-day week for the Pojo CotD crew. Monday we
had off due to Memorial Day, a U.S. holiday, while
Friday probably has a holiday we have it off for other
reasons. So our first review this week happens
today with Tyranitar (XY: Fates Collide
56/124; XY: Black Star Promos XY130). This
marks the proper return of Tyranitar to not only
Standard but even Expanded play; no Tyranitar-EX
and M Tyranitar-EX don’t count.
This is a Darkness
Type Pokémon, which is a mixed bag. In terms of
Weakness, only certain Psychic Types have to worry about
the Darkness Type, while Resistance is universal on the
currently released Fairy Type Pokémon (other than
Florges BREAK, of course). If the Fairy Type
ever gets its act together again for the competitive
scene, this is bad for Darkness Types; Klefki (XY:
Furious Fists 73/111) makes Resistance on Fairy
Types function as if it read -40, and the Type is most
famous for Max Potion and Energy moving
shenanigans with Aromatisse (XY 93/146).
There is one Fairy Type deck that is doing reasonably
well at Spring Regionals, but it’s Rainbow Road, built
around Xerneas (XY: BREAKthrough 107/162),
and the entire point of that deck is to run as many
different Pokémon Types as you can to power up the
“Rainbow Force” attack on that Xerneas.
There are some anti-Darkness-Type cards but so far, none
have proven particularly good; I will note that
Zygarde (XY: Fates Collide 52/124) is their
newest addition. Darkness Type support is best
because of the exemplary Pokémon in the Type, other than
Dark Patch (not an option in Standard). Yveltal-EX
gives them one of the best attackers in the game,
Sableye (BW: Dark Explorers 62/108) gives
them a sacrificial attacker that can reclaim two Item
cards, Darkrai-EX (BW: Dark Explorers
63/108, 107/108; BW: Black Star Promos BW46;
BW: Legendary Treasures 88/113) provides a free
Retreat for anything with [D] Type Energy attached plus
is a solid attacker even after so many years of power
creep, etc. These Pokémon keep the Type
competitive when otherwise it ought to be struggling.
Tyranitar
is a Stage 2 Pokémon; compared to most of what works,
this makes it slow and costly to play. You can go
Larvitar => Pupitar => Tyranitar,
or Larvitar => Tyranitar via Rare Candy,
or use a Wally, or get really weird and use
Maxie’s Hidden Ball Trick to Bench Pupitar
directly. No, I don’t really know why you would
try that last one. Tyranitar is going to need a
lot to justify all the time and cards going into it, and
it starts by having 160 HP. No actual Stage 2 has
more than this, though it falls a little short of
typical Basic Pokémon-EX and some of the bigger BREAK
Evolutions, let alone all Mega Evolutions and Wailord-EX.
Still, you have a decent shot of surviving a hit thanks
to that HP, unless Weakness is involved. Fighting
Weakness means Tyranitar is likely to be dropped
by a single shot; some potential luck if the Fighting
Type deck is more geared towards one-shotting
Pokémon-EX, as stuff like Fighting Stadium won’t
improve the damage done to Tyranitar. Tyranitar
does enjoy some Resistance; -20 may actually matter
given its HP even against things like Night March.
The massive four Energy Retreat Cost should not be paid;
find an alternative to retreating at full cost,
preferably two or three and run them all in your deck
(though some can be singles).
Tyranitar
has an Ability and attack that are pretty blatantly tied
together; we’ll begin with “Raging Roar”, the Ability.
Raging Roar triggers when you Evolve your Pokémon into
this Tyranitar from hand: you count how many
Prize cards your opponent has taken and attack that many
[D] Energy from your discard pile to itself. This
turns some of the slow, costly setup of the typical
Stage 2 deck to your Advantage; unless your opponent is
having trouble you’ll most likely give up at least one
Prize before Tyranitar can hit the field and
trigger Raging Roar. So, what attack are you
working with? “Dark Mountain”, with a cost of [DDDDD]
to do 150 damage while discarding the top two cards of
your own deck; for each Supporter the attack
discards, it does an additional 50 damage.
Discarding is not optional; if the target has low
enough HP that the base 150 will score the KO, you still
have to discard. The good news is that you may do
enough damage to OHKO anything without protection; even
our chunky Wailord-EX only has a printed maximum
HP score of 250. The less good news is Supporters
aren’t too bad to run heavy on and you can reclaim them
from the discard pile pretty easily with VS Seeker,
assuming Items aren’t being locked down.
The bad news is
that without any additional combo pieces, you’re relying
on the luck of having a Supporter in those top two
cards; even in a Supporter heavy build the odds are
slowly diminishing as you likely will be using more and
more Supporters each turn in addition to any you do
manage to discard with Dark Mountain. Said combos
are also desirable to minimize how many non-Supporter
cards you end up losing from the attack. There are
combos for this, but they are either unreliable, require
a lot of additional setup, or both. We’ll discuss
them a bit later. The damage is good but only the
max really hits an important threshold square on: Basic
Pokémon-EX with 170 or 180 HP can just barely survive,
and all but the smallest (or Darkness Weak) Mega
Evolutions can just barely survive a single Supporting
discarding hit. Yet there is always a “risk”
you’ll discard one or two Supporters, so including
something to increase damage not only means eating up
more deck space, but falling into overkill territory
when you do manage to hit Supporters with the discard
from Dark Mountain. Keeping on with that bad,
Raging Roar requires your opponent have taken Prizes to
work; while you could still be clearly in the lead, this
does mean it won’t provide serious acceleration until
your opponent has taken three or more Prizes. I
mean normally two Energy would be a good deal of
acceleration, but Dark Mountain needs five, so even
factoring in two manual Energy attachments over two
turns, you’d need the opponent to have taken at least
three Prizes.
So what about the
rest of the line? Larvitar has two options,
XY: Fates Collide 40/122 and XY: Fates Collide
41/122: both are Basic Fighting Types with Grass
Weakness, no Resistance, Retreat Cost [C], and no
Ability. XY: Fates Collide 40/122 has 60 HP and
the attack “Reckless Charge” for [C], do 20 to the
opponent’s Active and 10 to itself. XY: Fates
Collide 41/122 has 50 HP but two attacks: “Mountain
Munch” for [C] lets you discard the top card of the
opponent’s deck while for [CC] it can use “Corkscrew
Punch” to do 20 damage. Only one Pupitar,
XY: Fates Collide 42/122. As a Stage 1
Fighting Type with 80 HP, Grass Weakness, No Resistance,
Retreat Cost [C], no Ability, and just the attack
“Thrash”. Thrash costs [C] and 20 damage, with a
coin flip that determines between 20+20 damage (“heads”)
or 20 damage to yourself in addition to the 20 you do to
the opponent’s Active (“tails”). As you can tell,
these don’t help, though we have seen worse. As
you do have a choice, go with the 60 HP Larvitar,
XY: Fates Collide 40/122: I like the attacks
better on the other one, but not enough to offset the
ever-so-slight bump in changes to survive that 10 extra
HP gives it.
Now I’m not really
expecting Tyranitar to be a hit at tournaments,
but I do have some ideas if you just want to build and
enjoy a Tyranitar deck. First is to just
follow the usual “Dark Deck” guidelines, but star
Tyranitar. With Dark Patch in Expanded
and Yveltal (XY 78/146; XY: Black Star
Promos XY06; Generations RC16/RC32) in either
Standard or Expanded, you can get some extra Energy on
Tyranitar so that you don’t need Raging Roar to
attach as many. Yveltal can also act as an
opening sacrifice and possibly alternate attacker; you
need something that doesn’t require a lot of space but
could be easily built up into a threat. Yveltal-EX
is another option, of course, but it can’t help
Tyranitar directly. Losing the original,
regular Yveltal means an extra Energy attachment
from Raging Roar as well. The big problems with
this set up are that without massive luck (multiple
Dark Patch or the opponent’s offense being delayed),
Tyranitar isn’t going to be ready that fast, and
it is obviously less effective than your typical deck
focused around these cards would be (and perhaps less
fun than something more competitive or more creative).
Still focusing on
getting Tyranitar ready more quickly, an odd
thought is Milotic (XY: Flashfire 23/106);
you can not only use its Energy Grace to attach three
basic Energy cards from your discard pile to one of your
Pokémon in play (presumably Tyranitar or its
lower Stages), but since it is KOing itself that fuels
Raging Roar as well. In fact, if you can time it
correctly (Energy Grace then Raging Roar), you could
start with a Larvitar or Pupitar that has
no Energy to fully ready to attack, even if your
opponent has taken no Prizes before you KO Milotic
for Energy Grass. You’ll need to have four
Darkness Energy cards in the discard pile available
though, plus one in hand to attach manually, though.
The obvious flaw here is that Milotic has to
either Evolve from Feebas (possibly speeding it
up via Wally) or use Archie’s Ace in the Hole
to hit the field directly. This does bring us up
to another concern though; pushing for the OHKO. Gallade
(XY: BREAKthrough 84/162) improves your odds of
avoiding valuable cards/discarding the Supporters you
actually want to discard, thanks to its PokéDex-like
Ability. Or you could use Swampert (XY:
Primal Clash 26/160) and its “Diving Search” Ability
to ensure you top deck the exact Supporter you want, but
you can only do the top card, not the top two. The
former is probably best used with Maxie’s Hidden Ball
Trick while the latter is another potential target
for Archie’s Ace in the Hole. The thing is
those supporters have painful requirements to hit when
your deck is built around a wholly or mostly unrelated
(to those Supporters) Stage 2.
Alternatively you
could use the Item “Recycle” in Expanded; flip a
coin and if “heads” you get to top deck something from
your discard pile. If you want to “stack” more
than two cards on top without relying on said cards
already being in the top five of your deck, you’ll need
Recycle. In fact, if you want Diving Search
to guarantee you hit one Supporter, Recycle can
then top deck the second. All of this gives you a
massive monstrosity that can deal huge amounts of damage
up front, but the setup will be painful and it will be
vulnerable to more kinds of disruption. For
Limited, this thing looks like a beast to me, but it
still requires some caution. First, remember that
Limited uses four prizes instead of six. So the
most you’ll be able to attach via Raging Roar is three
Energy. You’ll have more time to build manually,
so it still remains a good trick. Average HP
scores tend to be lower, which is good as Dark Mountain
is rarely going to have a Supporter it can hit, and you
probably don’t want to discard but rather use what ones
you did pull anyway. Still, once it gets going
only the odd Pokémon-EX or Evolution will take more than
one hit. Which is good because of an additional
drawback for the attack in this format; Limited decks
are 40 cards, so discarding two cards is a bit bigger of
a deal as it is proportionately more of your deck and
you’ll have little to know way to reclaim what is
discarded. Lastly it will force you to run heavy
on basic Darkness Energy cards. As Raging
Roar recycles them, you probably won’t need to go
mono-Darkness, but you’ll want a lot since the attack
must you five of them, no less. All this
assumes you pull at least one Larvitar and
Pupitar as well.
Ratings
Standard:
1.9/5
Expanded:
2.1/5
Limited:
3.75/5
Summary:
Tyranitar actually has a lot going for it apart
from being a Stage 2, it is just while it gives us built
in recovery for when the opponent just keeps taking
Prizes along with the potential to OHKO anything
unprotected, but the unreliability of the last bit of
the needed damage and massive Energy cost means what we
really need is another Tyranitar to run
alongside this one. Something that is better early
to mid game. This one might actually be a bit
better in Expanded; while there are more dangers for it
to face, Dark Patch can really help with getting
Dark Mountain going before Raging Roar is attaching
much.
Though I am
probably overrating it; I now just have this paranoid
vision of something I didn’t suggest (or something I did
but dismissed) working and someone streaming
Tyranitar to victory.
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