aroramage |
Pretty much a simple card. It's
like Potion if Potion was better but also worse?
Super Potion heals off 60 damage,
which is twice as much as Potion's, but it also discards
an Energy off the Pokemon it heals from. It runs in a
similar vein in that respect to Max Potion, a card which
heals all the Energy off of a Pokemon but discards all
their Energy as well. In that regard, Super Potion can
be played as a cheaper alternative, and it can be played
around similarly too. Use Energy swapping Abilities to
move your stuff around, heal off what you need to with
Super Potion without losing any Energy, and then swap it
back on to keep yourself charged. Simple and effective!
Of course, Super Potion is, much
like its cousin Potion, heavily outclassed by a lot of
other cards, even within just healing. Sure, it's
probably better than the ACE SPEC Gold Potion, which
gave you an unlimited 90 healing as long as it was your
Active and that Gold Potion was your ACE SPEC of choice,
but beyond that it's hard to justify running it
competitively. Pokemon Center Lady does the same healing
and removes Statuses but is your Supporter for the turn,
and Rough Seas, while it heals less and only Water and
Electric-types, still heals off all of your Pokemon
rather than just one - at no additional cost.
Super Potion's drawback is a staple
to the card the way Potion's healing has to be the
absolute minimum standard of healing for anything. If it
didn't have the discard, it would just be a better
Potion, and that wouldn't make sense. I mean, why would
you run Potion if you had Super Potion which could do it
better? Course the drawback can be played around, but
once again, Max Potion becomes a superior option in that
regard. So you get stuck between choosing whether to
keep Super Potion in your deck or just give it up for
something better for the deck - whether that's healing,
draw power, searching, or just a better Item in general.
...did I just rant about Super
Potion for 3 paragraphs? Geez, next thing you know I'll
rant on Switch for 5!
Rating
Standard: 2/5 (it's a fine healing
option, it's just outclassed by a lot of other options
for the deck)
Expanded: 1.5/5 (...like, a LOT of
options)
Limited: 4.5/5 (but it's a gold
standard in Limited environments, that much I'm sure of)
Arora Notealus: Super Potion hasn't
changed much over the years. It's stronger nowadays,
able to heal up more than it used to, but it's as
overpriced as it is in the games. Seriously, 700
PokeDollars is not what you want to be using to heal 50
damage. Stick to Lemonades - they're cheaper AND heal
more.
...but seriously, I could go on
about Switch all day.
Next Time: Another card to put up
on review for tomorrow? This jar of bees ought to help
out with that review!!
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Otaku |
This week we’ll be looking at more cards from XY:
Evolutions and we begin with Super Potion (Base
Set 90/102; Base Set 2 117/130; XY
128/146; XY: Evolutions 87/108). Older
versions of Super Potion worked differently, but
an official errata was released so you may use those
older cards if you have them, however they work
exactly like the current versions. How
Super Potion works is fairly simple; it is a Trainer
card, specifically an Item, and it allows you to choose
one of your Pokémon and heal 60 damage from it.
You then must discard an Energy from the Pokémon you
just healed, however the discard is worded as an
“effect” and not a “cost”; this means you may target
something with 10 or more damage on it but no Energy and
still heal it. You are doing as much of the card
effect as you are able, and you are not using the
card for no effect, so it is legal.
The original Super Potion is quite similar; it
was a “normal Trainer” because we didn’t have the
subdivisions of Trainers we do now, but “normal Trainer”
cards just functioned like modern day Items so that is
really the same. Likewise, “removing damage
counters” is just the older wording for “healing”,
though “up to” might have allowed you to heal less than
the full amount (still a minor difference if it isn’t
just poor wording). The two significant
differences are that on the older Base Set 90/102
and Base Set 2 117/130 releases, the Energy
discard happened first and is a cost instead of
an effect (so you could not use it to heal something
that had no Energy attached), and that only four damage
counters were removed. Proportionately the older
version is more powerful, as the maximum printed
HP on anything at the time was 120, whereas now the
maximum printed HP is 250; Super Potion would
have to heal 80 or 90 damage (depending on whether you
round up or down) to be in scale. Except those
calculations ignore some of the added complexity of the
modern game.
The original max HP score of 120 applied to all Stages,
and there were no “special mechanics” like being a
Pokémon-EX or BREAK Evolution. The current maximum
HP on “regular” Basic Pokémon is 140, which would scale
to healing 40 or 50 damage (again, depending on whether
we round up or down), while for Evolutions (excluding
gimmicks like BREAK Evolutions) their current max HP is
160 and so healing would scale to 50 or 60 (again
depending upon whether you round up or down). So
for the largest Pokémon, Super Potion isn’t as
good as it once was, but ignoring mechanics that didn’t
exist at the time like Pokémon-EX (let alone Mega
Evolutions) and BREAK Evolutions, Super Potion
has either received a small buff or is still in scale. Super
Potion was already Expanded legal due to XY
128/146, but XY: Evolutions 87/108 returned it to
Standard play. The then current review crew
covered the first post-errata release of Super Potion
here,
making it their 10th place pick from XY. I
was not reviewing at the time, but I agreed with their
basic premise, however we were all wrong.
Why? Other healing options proved a better fit for
the pacing of the game.
If healing a target isn’t going to shift the KO turn
count or trigger an effect, then it doesn’t need the
healing. Where this does matter, we have Max
Potion to heal all damage but discard all attached
Energy; that drawback worked out fine for the various
decks that could rapidly reattach what was lost, whether
by moving Energies around, mass recycling and
reattachment, or because the target only needed one
easily replaced Energy in the first place. It is
even still Standard legal. Super Scoop Up was
Standard legal but now is only an option for Expanded
and was similar in use to Max Potion, except with
the added blessing/constraint of bouncing the target
Pokémon and all cards attached to hand. The
abundance of Item lock meant that supporters like AZ
and Pokémon Center Lady also go in on the
healing, with AZ being the guaranteed bounce
(even if it discarded attached cards) and Pokémon
Center Lady healing the same 60 damage as Super
Potion, only without any Energy discard and with
the added effect of removing Special Conditions.
With a slower pace, Super Potion could prove
worthwhile, at least if it leads to Pokémon with a
greater “investment” so that options like Max Potion
are far too wasteful. Until then it will be a card
that on paper is adequate but in practice falls short
for both Standard and Expanded play. You can
however enjoy it quite a bit for Limited, where it is a
good pull indeed.
Ratings
Standard:
2/5
Expanded:
2/5
Limited:
4/5
Summary:
Super Potion can’t win for losing. There is
a niche for it, except it is one that no currently
competitive deck needs filled; a decent chunk of healing
for a single Energy discard (or none if there is no
Energy to discard). Between the smaller targets
that won’t survive long enough to need healing, the
larger targets that need more healing to make a
difference, and the various targets that can’t afford
the discard cost or could afford the larger discard cost
of Max Potion, Super Potion is going to be
a shelf-warmer at the ol’ Poké Mart.
I wanted to re-review this card for a few reasons;
mainly because it looked relatively easy to cover and I
was late getting out the list of cards to review to the
others, and to ease into our first full week back into
regular reviews. I also used to wish this card
would return, and like Baby Mario and HEZ I expected
more of it when it was reprinted with a boost in the
damage healed and changing the Energy discard
into an effect instead of a cost.
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