Otaku |
My missing reviews
for this Top 20 list should all have been posted by the
time you read this, as well as a revised version of
last Friday’s review; had a simple typo and decided to use it as an excuse to
run through the stats and effect of Aegislash-EX
in more detail. Feel free to give those a read.
I’d link to the ones that were late, but by now I’m not
completely certain which those were. Our 12th
place finisher is Xerosic (XY: Phantom Forces
110/119, 119/119). As someone who hasn’t played
the video games, watched the animation, or read the
manga in a few generations, I took a moment to look up
the character for the purpose of telling a few good
jokes. While an interesting read, I’ll just make
the humorous observation I could have based on card art
alone: Xerosic joins the small pool of potentially
accurate cosplay options for the plus-size. Well,
I’m still too large to pull him off well but I’m also to
lazy and broke to cosplay. So… onto the card!
Xerosic
is a Trainer, specifically a Supporter. Thankfully
both anti-Trainer and anti-Supporter effects aren’t that
abundant and what we have hasn’t proven effective, so we
can focus on the rest of what that means. The bits
we have of general Trainer assisting effects apply to
Xerosic, though not all will be especially helpful;
snagging it Trainers’ Mail is usually a good
thing, unless you really needed a different card and/or
already used a Supporter this turn, but fetching it with
Skyla usually isn’t worth the effort. That
brings us to our next point; you normally may only use a
single Supporter on your turn, so all Supporters are in
moderate competition with each other. It isn’t
true, completely competition like with an Ace Spec card,
where regardless of the card name your deck is allowed a
single card with that mechanic in your deck, but you
don’t want too many Supporters in your deck for fear of
them clogging up your hand most of the time. This
is why the designers invented the mechanic; it was a few
years into the TCG when they realized “Hey, players like
powerful Trainers but all the ones like that we’ve
released have caused game balance and/or pacing issues.”
So Xerosic needs a good effect to be worth the
space, and he allows you to pick between two; either you
may discard a Pokémon Tool or a Special Energy card that
is in play. When this was released (and still in
Expanded), we had Item card that could already discard a
Special Energy (Enhanced Hammer) and other Item
cards could discard multiple Pokémon Tools in a
single turn (Startling Megaphone, Tool
Scrapper). Yet this card managed to take
4th place
on our Top 10 Picks of XY: Phantom Forces
countdown. Why?
Having two
different effects makes it less likely Xerosic
will be dead in hand; Enhanced Hammer is no use
to you if your opponent has no Special Energy in play,
while Startling Megaphone doesn’t help you if
your opponent has no Special Energy in play, and can
backfire if you are also running Pokémon Tool F cards
(which also released in this expansion). For those
rare times you need to discard one of your own Special
Energy cards and not uncommon times when you need to
discard a Pokémon Tool from one of your own Pokémon
(again mostly Pokémon Tool F cards your opponent would
use against you), Xerosic has you covered while
the other two don’t (though Tool Scrapper can
also target your own Pokémon). This alone isn’t
enough, but thanks to other card released from both
prior to, in, and after XY: Phantom Forces, we
had a good reason to want these effects on a Supporter
and not an Item card. Item lock effects aren’t new
and weren’t knew when Xerosic released, but
additional Item lock cards were released as well as
cards that comboed well with those already available. XY:
Phantom Forces gave Seismitoad-EX
Lysandre’s Trump Card and Slurpuff (XY:
Phantom Forces 69/119). The former was banned
and the latter was replaced by Shaymin-EX (XY:
Roaring Skies 77/108, 106/108), but it still made
for some vicious Item lock decks. Except it often
relied heavily on Double Colorless Energy, so a
well timed Xerosic had a chance of preventing
Seismitoad-EX from attacking, thus breaking the
lock. Another partner for Seismitoad-EX was
Garbodor (BW: Dragons Exalted 54/124;
BW: Plasma Freeze 119/116; BW: Legendary
Treasures 68/113). With Seismitoad-EX
up front to block Item usage, usual counters
Startling Megaphone and Tool Scrapper
couldn’t discard the Tool from Garbodor, allowing
its “Garbotoxin” Ability to shut down all other
Abilities, for a devastating double lock. Except
Xerosic could punch through and still discard the
Tool from Garbodor, turning off Garbotoxin and
every other Ability back on.
We also received
Battle Compressor and VS Seeker in XY:
Phantom Forces, so instead of needing two or more
Xerosic to have a good chance of Xerosic
being in hand at the correct time, you could run a
single copy, discard it first or second turn with
Battle Compressor, then recycle it up to four times
with VS Seeker as needed. This worked with
other potent TecH Supporters. It was followed by
Shaymin-EX further reducing the reliance on draw
Supporters. Suddenly you could afford to run two,
three, even four Supporters as singles but enjoy them
rapidly and reliably, and have an alternative means of
draw to assist in your set and field maintenance, so
that you could afford to use the TecH instead of needing
it for Professor Sycamore or the like. So,
turns out my review from when the card was new was
pretty accurate; I’d left it off my own Top 10 list for
XY: Phantom Forces, but stated that was a
mistake. I thought the card had potential but it
needed a little more to justify heavy play… and it got
that thanks to the potency of Battle Compressor
with VS Seeker, as well as Item lock. At
least when those first two weren’t being countered by
the third. In Expanded play, Xerosic is
still a common TecH option; not quite a staple, but
often used. I’ll be bumping up the card’s score
for that reason, but understand it’s got a lot of
competition and not just in discarding Tools or Special
Energy; had we looked at it before say Delinquent,
Pokémon Ranger, and other useful TecH Supporters
released, I would have scored it higher still. For
Limited it is a great pull because this set has multiple
Tools and Special Energy cards in it. You might
face an opponent that didn’t get any or never gets a
chance to play them, but better safe than sorry.
So why is it on
this list? Garbodor (XY: BREAKpoint
57/122) has returned Garbotoxin to Standard play, but
there is no Trainer based method of discarding a Pokémon
Tool from it. Mega Evolutions are enjoying some
time in the sun now several (but not all) low resource
attackers have rotated out of the Standard card pool,
lost some pieces of support due to rotation, or had
counters released. On top of the previous two,
without an easy means of being discarded, players are
now comfortable relying on Pokémon Tools with more
passive effects… and even if they weren’t Fighting
Fury Belt is still a commonly played, strong Tool.
If reprinted, unless another effective method of Tool
discard was released, Xerosic would at least
temporarily become a staple. It may even remain
one, as I don’t know if the metagame would shift as
radically for it as it did for Startling Megaphone
and Tool Scrapper. With those two, players
had to read the metagame to know whether Tool usage
spiked so it was worth including something just to
discard them, which in turn would eventually lead to a
decline in Tool usage, leading to players dropping Tool
discarding cards, which then lead to Tool usage
increasing again and the whole thing repeating.
Ratings
Standard:
N/A
Expanded:
3.65/5
Limited:
4/5
Summary:
Xerosic gives you the option of running one card
that can do two different, useful things - discarding a
Special Energy or discarding a Tool - and with no
targeting restrictions save those imposed by other cards
(stuff like the Ancient Trait “Ω Barrier” can still
block the effect of Xerosic). You pay a
premium for this package, but the competitive side of
the Pokémon TCG has demonstrated that often, this is a
good deal. The intricacies of how it reacts with
other cards and the shifting metagame can make it quite
easy to under- or overstate this card’s effectiveness.
Xerosic
managed to accrue 25 voting points, three points shy of
what secured 11th place and only a point ahead of
yesterday’s
Focus Sash. For my personal Top 20, I had
Xerosic in 5th place; 12th seems a bit too low.
Still I can see it as lower than 5th place if someone
does not value general usage or Tool discarding Trainers
as much as I do, and already can formulate an argument
for why; sometimes niche effects are so powerful they
shape the rest of the game, and the instant we get
another effective form of Tool discard (or something
else causes Tools to be used less), Xerosic
becomes a luxury. After all, it has lost Battle
Compressor to go with VS Seeker.
|
Zach Carmichael |
Phantom Forces was a pretty
significant set for the Standard format. It gave us a
number of prominent cards in competitive play, including
great attackers like Manectric-EX and Dialga-EX;
Energy accelerators like M Manectric-EX and
Bronzong; and Aegislash-EX as a viable
counter to Special Energy-based decks. Today’s Card of
the Day is Xerosic, a Supporter that is also from
Phantom Forces. Initially dismissed because it wasn’t
quite as efficient as Item cards like Enhanced Hammer
or Startling Megaphone, Xerosic later
became a staple in most decks and will be missed sorely
with the new rotation in Standard.
Xerosic is unique because it
gives you options as a Supporter, much like
Giovanni’s Scheme. You can discard a single Special
Energy or Tool card from either player’s Pokémon. At the
time, Seismitoad-EX was rampant, and the Item
lock prevented counters like Enhanced Hammer and
Head Ringer from being played down. Xerosic
(and Team Flare Grunt) helped remedy that void
and provided a line of defense against the big, blue
amphibian.
While it has rotated in Standard,
Xerosic will continue to thrive in Expanded.
Seismitoad-EX is still big, though new Water Box
variants solely use Basic Energy to take advantage of
Max Elixir, making Xerosic ineffective.
However, the card is still great against Night Marchers,
as well as decks like Darkrai/Giratina and Dark-type
decks using Fright Night Yveltal. It can be
played alongside Tool Scrapper or Startling
Megaphone for maximum disruption against Tool cards
that otherwise become inherently powerful in competitive
play, such as Fighting Fury Belt and Bursting
Balloon.
Ratings
Standard: N/A
Expanded: 4/5
Limited: 1/5
Summary: Xerosic
became a staple in the Standard format and helped
balance a format dominated by Special Energy attackers
amidst an era filled with Item lock and powerful Tool
cards. It provided a means to constantly disrupt
throughout the game versus a single use from Item cards.
The Standard format will now struggle due to Tool cards
now being permanent, so hopefully we will see a reprint
of Xerosic much like how N did.
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