Otaku |
Welcome to Dual
Type Week here on Pojo! Why? I noticed I’d
failed to review some of them during our last countdown…
then realized we hadn’t looked at most of them,
some of which have been pretty significant to
competitive play. So let’s remedy that situation
right now.
First up this week
is Shifty (XY: Steam Siege 11/114), which
is both Darkness and Grass Typed. This blend means
hitting chunks of the Fighting Type, Psychic Type, and
Water Type for double damage, with Resistance only being
a factor against the Fairy Type. Type specific
countermeasures are unimpressive, with me once again
trotting out Parallel City as the one you’re most
likely to encounter; it only reduces the damage done by
-20 and it’s being run for the other effect but
sometimes your opponent can afford to shrink his own
Bench to fake Resistance. The combination of
Darkness and Grass support yields some interesting
combinations. Being a Grass Type doesn’t add much
in direct support; Revitalizer springs to mind,
but if there is a stand out trick, I’m going to have to
look like an idiot for missing it. Forest of Giant
Plants does not care about what Shiftry
is, only its lower Stages, so technically it doesn’t
belong here. Being able to share support with
certain other Grass Types may or may not matter, and
we’ll address that later in the review (same for sharing
support with certain Darkness Types). Speaking of
which the Darkness Type also threatens to come up short.
It isn’t that the Type is lacking for tricks, but even
in Expanded we have some issues with those tricks
clashing. For example, Dark Patch may not
play nice with the rest of the deck as it works only
with Darkness Energy and Reverse Valley
has to compete with Forest of Giant Plants.
Being a Stage 2 is
rough, which is why Forest of Giant Plants keeps
popping up; without it you’ll have to go Seedot
=> Nuzleaf => Shiftry taking three turns,
Seedot => Rare Candy => Shiftry
taking only two turns but more open to disruption, or
Seedot => Nuzleaf => Shiftry with a
Wally somewhere in there to take only two turns, but
burn a Supporter usage. All options are card
intensive, and I do not expect anything other
than the Forest of Giant Plants road to prove
worthwhile (if even that). 140 HP is okay; Stage 2
Pokémon can have up to 160 (unless I missed a new record
breaker), but the amount is still only a little above
the average damage yield of your typical 2HKO deck.
Being a resource intensive Stage 2 means streaming
Shiftry will be rough and that means being
OHKO’d by so many decks is an issue; not a deal breaker
(yet), but a definite concern. Fire Weakness is
dangerous right now; the most likely alternate Weakness
(Fighting) wouldn’t have been any safer, so no
complaining from me. Fire Weakness is currently
dangerous due to Volcanion and Volcanion-EX
decks; if Abilities are online and Energy is in the
hand, or else enough is already on the field, Shiftry
is going down in one hit. Maybe even for a single
Energy attack. No Resistance is the worst but
still not a big deal, while a Retreat Cost of [CC] is
neither a good nor a bad deal. A bit too pricey to
pay to retreat but low enough it’s still plausible when
you don’t have a choice.
Shiftry
beings two attacks to bear: “Wicked Wind” and
“Extrasensory”. The former costs [G] and does 40
damage while negating the effects of all Pokémon Tools
and Stadium cards in play until the end of your
opponent’s next turn, while the latter requires [CC] and
does 60 damage base and under the right conditions (if
your hand is the same size as your opponent’s) another
60 for a total of 120. 40 for one is good, but not
enough to make a Stage 2 attacker, and the same goes for
doing 60 for two. The effects hold some promise,
but are not enough to offset the effort involved in
reaching them, at least in and of themselves.
Wicked Wind does apply to Stadium and Tool cards
played during your opponent’s next turn, so unless your
opponent has Pokémon Ranger handy, he or she is
basically without those cards. Except when it
comes to using them to trigger effects; the Stadium
and/or Pokémon Tool is still there. Your opponent
can play a new Stadium card to discard one currently in
play (assuming they have different names) or attach
Pokémon Tools to clear out his or her hand. More
specialized examples would be how the “Dragon Road”
Ability on Hydreigon-EX or “Garbotoxin” on
Garbodor (XY: BREAKpoint 57/122) and the
older Garbodor (BW: Dragons Exalted
54/124; BW: Plasma Freeze 119/116; BW:
Legendary Treasures 68/113) still work with a
negated Stadium in play and Pokémon Tool attached
(respectively, and of course not at the same time).
Consistently synching up hand size is no mean feat
either; it is easy enough you can do it without special
deck preparation (with careful hand management and some
luck) but tricky enough that you cannot rely on
it even when a deck is built for it.
Reading my own
words, it seems like I keep hinting that there is a deck
that might make this all work out, even though I keep
pointing out Shiftry itself falls at least a
little short. That is not the case. I have a
few ideas, but before we delve into them, let’s run
through what all Shiftry has to work with simply
by being part of its Evolution line. Seedot has
four options: BW: Next Destinies 2/99, XY:
Flashfire 5/106, XY: BREAKpoint 4/122, and
XY: Steam Siege 9/114. All are Basic, Grass
Type Pokémon with Fire Weakness, Retreat Cost [C], no
Ancient Trait, no Ability, and just one attack.
Only XY: BREAKpoint 4/122 and XY: Steam Siege
9/114 are Standard legal. All but BW: Next
Destinies 2/99 have 50 HP and no Resistance: it has
40 HP with Water Resistance) with the attack
“Trip Over” for [C], doing 10 damage plus another 10
with a successful coin toss. XY: Flashfire 5/106
has “Call for Family”, also at a cost of [C], which
allows you to search your deck for one Basic Pokémon to
add to your Bench. XY: BREAKpoint 4/122 knows
“Ram” to do 10 damage, and still at a cost of [C]. XY:
Steam Siege 9/114 shakes things up by having an
attack cost of [G] to use “Bide”, which allows you to
flip a coin should an attack during your opponent’s next
turn KO Seedot, and if “heads” Seedot
isn’t KO’d but has 10 HP left instead. I would
favor XY: Flashfire 5/106 or XY: Steam Siege
9/114 as the former can at least aid in setup while the
latter can try and stall to buy time to Evolve. If
you’re not running a source of [G] Energy though then
Bide won’t be an option, but ideally you’ll have
Forest of Giant Plants and Nuzleaf (if not
Shiftry as well) and none of this will really
matter.
Nuzleaf
has four options as well: BW: Next Destinies
71/99, XY: Flashfire 6/106, XY: BREAKpoint
72/122, and XY: Steam Siege 10/114. All are
less uniform than the Seedot were, but are all
still Stage 1 Pokémon with Retreat Cost [C], no Ancient
Trait and no Ability. BW: Next Destinies 71/99
is a Darkness Type with 80 HP, FIghting Weakness,
Psychic Resistance, and the attack “Surprise Punch” for
[DC], doing 20 damage while moving an Energy from the
opponent’s Active to one of his or her Benched Pokémon.
XY: Flashfire 6/106 is a Grass Type with 80 HP,
Fire Weakness, no Resistance, and two attacks: “Razor
Leaf” for [C] doing 20 and “Cut” for [GCC] doing 40. XY:
BREAKpoint 72/122 is another Darkness Type with 80
HP, Fighting Weakness, and Psychic Resistance but this
time two attacks: for [D] “Corkscrew Punch” does 20
damage while for [CC] “Razor Wind” does 40 on “heads”
but zero on “tails”. XY: Steam Siege
10/114 is back to being a Grass Type with Fire Weakness,
and no Resistance. It has the least HP at 70, and
its attacks are “Harden” for [G] and Razor Leaf for
[CC]. Harden is an all or nothing damage soak; if
an attack does more than 60 damage it all goes
through but if 60 or less it is all absorbed by
the effect. Razor Leaf still only does 20 damage,
even though this costs twice as much as it does on
XY: Flashfire 6/106. The big decider here is
Forest of Giant Plants; unless your deck is
skipping it, your real choices are between XY:
Flashfire 6/106 and XY: Steam Siege 10/114,
and their merits are small enough (and hopefully totally
unneeded) so you may as well pick which one tickles your
fancy.
There are four
three other options for Shiftry. We have
BW: Next Destinies 72/99, XY: Flashfire
7/106, XY: Black Star Promos XY23, and XY:
BREAKpoint 73/122. All of these are Stage 2
Pokémon with no Ancient Trait. BW: Next Destinies
72/99 is a Darkness Type with 130 HP, Fighting Weakness,
Psychic Resistance, Retreat Cost [C], the Ability “Giant
Fan”, and the attack “Whirlwind”. Giant Fan is an
Ability that triggers when you Evolve one of your in
play Pokémon into this Shiftry from hand; you
flip a coin and if “heads” you choose one of your
opponent’s Pokémon and shuffle it and all cards attached
to it into your opponent’s deck. Whirlwind costs
[DDC] to do 60 damage and force your opponent’s Active
to the Bench (after you do the damage); your
opponent chooses his or her new Active. I could
have sworn we reviewed this before, but if we did my
Ctrl+F search is failing to locate it. For those
unaware, in the Expanded format, due to Super Scoop
Up and/or Devolution Spray, Forest of
Giant Plants, several useful draw/search Item cards,
and Shaymin-EX (XY: Roaring Skies 77/108,
106/108), it became possible to spam Giant Fan so many
times that even with the risk of tails, even
with some Basic Pokémon having the Ancient Trait “Θ
Stop” for protection, odds were your opponent could win
by Benching you out on his or her first turn. This
includes T1 of the game. Just to add insult to
injury, your opponent might need several minutes before
he or she won, so it wasn’t even a fast loss.
Though the deck was hardly foolproof, but it proved
reliable enough that Shiftry got the boot (even
though it took Forest of Giant Plants to cause
problems).
XY: Flashfire
7/106 has 140 HP, Fire Weakness, no Resistance, and
Retreat Cost [CC]. Its Ability is “Leaf Draw”,
which allows you to (once per turn) discard a [G] Energy
card from hand to draw three cards; its attack is
“Deranged Dance” which costs [GCC] and does 20 damage
times the number of Benched Pokémon in play (for both
players). That gives Deranged Dance a range of
zero to 200 damage (or 320 if Sky Field is in
play), though much of the time your opponent will
minimize his or her Bench size. We’ve looked at
this card before right
here
and my review underscores why it was a problem for me to
try to review without having even a modicum of
contemporary, hands-on experience. I expected a lot out
of Shifty because the Ability and attack are
each, separately good. Maybe even very good.
It wasn’t enough though as your opponent often could
manage his or her Bench to deny you OHKOs against
Pokémon-EX and Shiftry wasn’t likely enough to
survive to attack twice. Deranged Dance was just
pricey enough that as control decks started stepping up,
even though it ought to have been handy against
Seismitoad-EX, it wasn’t. Each time this
Shiftry looked like it ought to catch a break (Sky
Field increasing Bench size and thus damage output,
Forest of Giant Plants providing Evolution
acceleration) some other aspect of the card got in the
way. It is Expanded legal only and I am still
tempted to try and make it work, except Volcanion/Volcanion-EX
decks now make it even more likely your opponent can
torch these before you finish building them.
XY: Black Star
Promos
XY23 is again a Grass Type with 140 HP, Fire Weakness,
no Resistance, and a Retreat Cost of [CC]. Like
today’s Shiftry, it is bringing two attacks to
the table. In fact, the first attack - “Whisk
Away” - only costs [G] like Wicked Wind. Whisk
Away does 30 damage, lets you pick a card from your
opponent’s hand and look at it; if it is a Pokémon it
gets sent to the bottom of your opponent’s deck and the
attack does an extra 30 damage (so 60 total). If
it is any other kind of card, it’s just 30 for
[G]. Its “Spirit Dance” costs [GCC] and does 60
damage and has you flip two coins; each “heads” adds 30
more damage. So 60-90-120 split, with 90 being the
most likely. Whisk Away might have some merit, but
Spirit Dance is underwhelming and so the entire package
falls far short of being competitive. For more
details, check out our Card of the Day on it
here;
we were running through various promos and so it got a
look, and we were too generous with it. XY:
BREAKpoint 73/122 is a Stage 2 Darkness Type with
140 HP, Fighting Weakness, Psychic Resistance, Retreat
Cost [C], and two attacks. For [DC] it can use
“Roll Up” to flip three coins and if any of them
are “heads” your opponent reveals his or her hand and
for each “heads” you get to discard a card you find
there. For [DCC] you can use “Otherworldly Return”
to do 60 damage plus add a Trainer card from your
discard pile to hand. Effects are nice, but not
for the Energy. The damage is poor for the Energy
in the second attack and non-existent in the first.
Don’t waste time on this one.
Still with me?
I wish I had good news, but the best I can come up with
for today’s Shifty (XY: Steam Siege
11/114) is a kind of “rush” deck using it with
Yanmega (XY: Steam Siege 7/114)/Yanmega
BREAK. Why? Both are Grass decks, and
that’s the Yanmega that with “Sonic Vision”,
allowing it to use its attacks for [0] instead of their
usual costs, so long as you have four cards in hand.
How does these two attackers combo? Judge forces
both players to draw until each has four cards in hand,
Shiftry has low Energy costs and can use Grass
Type support, so together they all have just barely
enough synergy to give it a try (by which I mean
probably half a dozen or so games to see if it works at
all). With Ability denial being not Uncommon in
Standard and Expanded, you cannot get by with no Energy
in a Yanmega deck, but Vespiquen and/or
Vileplume (XY: Ancient Origins 3/98) may no
longer be the best partners for it. Shiftry is
Energy efficient enough that with some Grass Energy
and four Double Colorless Energy, you’ve got a
possible back up attacker. Shutting down Stadium
cards and Tools may also prove worthwhile; rushing out a
Shiftry can stall Mega Evolving decks and force
those relying upon Sky Field, Forest of Giant
Plants, etc. to effectively go without. In the
case of Sky Field, players still end up
discarding excess Benched Pokémon, as Wicked Wind
temporarily shuts off their effects.
So… not a whole lot
of hope for Standard play, but at least it is legal.
Slightly worse odds in Expanded; while it gains access
to some extra dance partners I think it ends up being
worse off for the competition. Yes, even shutting
down Fighting Fury Belt isn’t that big of a deal
as the attack doing it doesn’t hit very hard. Do
enjoy this in Limited play, but mostly because it is a
Stage 2 with inexpensive attack costs. There are
no Stadium cards in XY: Steam Siege and the only
Pokémon Tools are Spirit Link cards that either
won’t matter at all or will be very important (but still
only for one turn). You’ll have even less of a
chance to match your opponent’s hand size as well, but
the +60 damage is even more worthwhile here, as are the
base damage scores for both attacks.
Ratings
Standard:
2/5
Expanded:
1.75/5
Limited:
3.5/5
Summary:
Not an exciting start to the week; a long (and late)
review to tell you that this card is at best mediocre.
Hopefully another reviewer knows something I don’t, but
then again I picked the cards this week so probably not.
Shiftry has a Type combo without too much
synergy and okay attacks, but it may as well have been a
pure Grass Type.
|
Zach Carmichael |
With our list of top cards rotating
from Standard, we can now focus on cards from newer sets
such as Steam Siege. Today we kick it off by looking at
Shiftry, one of the first dual-type Pokémon we’ve had in
a long time. I like that Pokémon decided to bring this
mechanic back, as it allows for greater diversity in
terms of deck-building and players to experiment with
these Pokémon in new and creative ways. Though the card
has not seen play as of yet, I think it has a bit of
potential, and I will try to use my “theorymon” skills
to give ideas on potential decks and strategies!
Shiftry is both Grass and
Dark-types. It has a solid 140 HP and two attacks:
Wicked Wind and Extrasensory. The first does 40 damage
for a single Grass Energy and negates the effects of
both Stadium and Tool cards. Considering pretty much all
decks use these types of cards, right away I can see the
usefulness here, though the poor damage output is
concerning. The second attack does 60 damage for two
Colorless Energy and can inflict 60 more if you and your
opponent have the hand size. Being able to hit 120
damage for a single Energy attachment is nothing to
scoff at, especially since you can use Max Potion to
heal off damage to rinse and repeat.
Adding to this is the fact that
Shiftry can, in fact, take advantage of Forest of Giant
Plants, so you can potentially get it out the first
turn. The Grass-typing makes it an ideal counter to both
Greninja BREAK and Zygarde-EX decks, though neither deck
is popular at the moment thanks to the popularity of
both Vespiquen and Garbodor in Standard. Being a
Dark-type in addition to Grass is nice, but it would
have been better had Trevenant XY stayed in the format.
There aren’t really many Pokémon weak to Dark,
unfortunately, so this typing is a bit useless at the
moment.
To be honest, I’m not sure what
type of deck you would build Shiftry around. The first
attack does a solid job in shutting off Stadiums and
Tools, but I can’t see the viability of it besides the
first couple turns when your opponent is setting up
their board. Had the attack shut it off until the end of
your next turn versus your opponent’s, it would have
been a fantastic way to counter Garbodor and use your
Abilities, but this is not the case. The second attack
can quickly two-shot most Pokémon in the format and is
Energy-efficient, but having played Yanmega BREAK I can
say that it is harder than one might think to pull off
the same hand size as your opponent. Judge is the
easiest way to accomplish this, but I am not a fan of
this Supporter because drawing a meager four cards is
vastly inferior to other shuffle and draw cards like N.
I think the best pairing would be
another attacker than can hit for a Double Colorless
Energy, perhaps one whose attack can do just enough
damage to compliment Shiftry’s Extrasensory to hit those
magic numbers. Keep in mind that Rainbow Energy counts
as any Energy, so another option might be an attacker
than can use Rainbow and Double Colorless Energy, such
as Jolteon or Glaceon. Something else to consider is
that Mew-EX has returned, so its Versatile Ability can
copy Shiftry’s attacks to potentially counter M Mewtwo-EX
decks, at least before Garbodor comes into play.
Ratings
Standard: 2/5
Expanded: 1.5/5
Limited: 1.5/5
Summary: Shiftry brings fresh life into the game
with its dual-typing and ability to evolve right away
thanks to Forest of Giant Plants, but I’m not so sure
how playable it will be. I don’t believe the right
partner has been revealed yet, but that is not to say
that it will not be used competitively in the coming
months. A case study to look at is the Ancient Trait
Gyarados from Ancient Origins, a card which recently
became its own deck after placing Top 16 at a recent
Regional Championship. The Standard format is relatively
young and will continue to grow as new decks emerge with
new set releases this 2016-17 season.
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