21times |
Krookadile
(Sun & Moon, 85/149) a Stage 2 Pokemon with 150
HP has two attacks,
False Accusation
and Obsidian Fang.
We’ll focus more on
False Accusation, but I used
Obsidian Fang a fair number of times.
False
Accusation can hit for quite a bit of damage – in
one match against
Lapras GX (Sun & Moon, 35/149) I hit for 300
damage (I’m pretty sure my opponent was ignorant of the
parameters of
False Accusation as he just kept using
Lapras’ Collect
attack and stacking cards in his hand).
However, the average hand size is only four
cards, so the attack
False Accusation
has a significant amount of inconsistency inherent to
its nature.
I have not seen
Krookadile used even a single time in the two months of play since
SUM’s release, and I couldn’t find many videos on
it, so I built the deck with four
Unown (Ancient
Origins, 30/98) as the only other Pokemon outside of
a 4-2-4 line of Krookadile. I managed to
win only 3 out of 10 matches.
I felt that it provided a higher level of
competition than some of the other decks reviewed
recently (Vikavolt
(Sun & Moon, 52/149)
Dragonite (Sun
& Moon, 96/149) and
Gigalith (Sun
& Moon, 71/149), but it still falls short of even tier
two status.
I doubt that you will win half of your matches with this
deck in the current meta.
Your opponent will usually limit their hand size
to minimize the damage from
False Accusation,
and Obsidian
Fang’s four energy cost for only 120 damage is less
than desirable.
Rating
Standard: 2 out of 5
Conclusion
If the meta did not include EX
and GX Pokemon,
Krookadile would probably be a pretty good card.
Unfortunately, it seems to fall into that group
of many other Stage 1’s and 2’s that’s just not up to
the same level as many of the other competitive decks in
the current meta.
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Otaku |
Timer Ball
(Sun & Moon 134/149) is a new Trainer card,
specifically an Item. Item cards have no intrinsic
cost to play, unlike say a Supporter that has a
once-per-turn usage restriction. Which is why Item
cards typically are much weaker than Supporters, and why
the powers-that-be are happy to give us multiple
effective forms of Item lock while (thankfully) not
giving us generic Trainer or Supporter lock (at least,
not worth running competitively). Though their
general counters aren’t good, some of the generic
Trainer support like Skyla and Trainers’ Mail
can be quite good. Conversely, while Items face
some really bad counters, generic Item support isn’t
great. There are some nice deck specific options,
though, like Sableye (BW: Dark Explorers
62/108) and Korrina… both of which are Expanded
only. So what does Timer Ball actually do?
You flip two coins, and for each “heads”, search your
deck for an Evolution to add to your hand. At a
glance, this seems like a solid, maybe even a good,
effect. Unfortunately, it isn’t one I’ve had time
to test out much myself; it is included in some of the
Theme Decks (embarrassing though it is to admit), I
cannot clearly remember if I tried it out in Standard or
Expanded play myself. So we’ll have to tackle this
mostly in the realm of theory… or perhaps I should say
Theorymon.
There aren’t any
Energy based search options in Expanded or Standard
play, and the Pokémon based options are usually pretty
deck specific. Timer Ball isn’t completely
general itself, seeing as it can only fetch Evolutions,
but as there isn’t a Pokémon directly competing
with this tactic outside of the deck specific options, I
think we can skip them, at least for now. So, let
us look at the Trainer based search options. We’ll
start with the ones that offer totally unrestricted
search; they get you the Pokémon you want, but they also
have a different cost and only grab one Pokémon:
Master Ball, Poké Ball, Trevor, and
Ultra Ball. Master Ball is an Item but an
Ace Spec only legal for Expanded play. Poké Ball
requires one coin flip, but does absolutely nothing on
“tails”. Trevor is a Supporter. Ultra Ball
requires a two card discard cost from your hand.
These four are useful as a baseline both for
search and for what different categories of Trainer are
worth, though I suspect the latter may not be completely
accurate if we try and transfer it to other effects.
To give you an idea, if this pattern were applied
universally, being an Ace Spec, requiring a coin flip,
being a Supporter, or requiring a discard cost of two
cards from hand would all be interchangeable…
disregarding that Ultra Ball is the one that
people consistently choose to run, so clearly they are
not equal. Master Ball loses out to other
Ace Spec cards, Trevor to other Supporters, while
most prefer the reliability of Ultra Ball
versus the uncertainty of Poké Ball.
The two coin flips
of Timer Ball are not a bad trade off; even
though the discard cost of Ultra Ball often
compliments preferred draw cards in competitive play,
sometimes you just don’t have two cards in hand to
discard. Two flips to get up to two targets means
only one in four possible outcomes gives you nothing,
with two out of for providing a single Evolution and one
in four yielding two. Being restricted to an
Evolution certainly matters, though. It isn’t a
killer, but let us expand our other search options. Brigette,
Lure Ball, and Pokémon Fan Club are all
Trainers that get Basic Pokémon; they might be options
for complementing Timer Ball in the right deck,
but obviously, it won’t be replacing them. Dive Ball
is an Item that searches out any Water Pokémon; Timer
Ball might have a chance in Water Decks that need
more than Dive Ball but would prefer not to
use Ultra Ball. Perhaps Greninja BREAK
decks? Evosoda and Wally allow you to
select one of your Pokémon already in play, search your
deck for something that Evolves from that Pokémon, then
plays what you searched out directly onto that
initial target. Evosoda is an Item but can only
be used on a Pokémon ready to Evolve, while Wally
is a Supporter and it cannot select a Pokémon-EX for the
first step but it can be used the first turn a
Pokémon is in play as well as a player’s first turn.
While this means they are indeed Evolution-only search,
they are mostly used to get around Evolution blocking
effects, or in the case of Wally, for decks that
need to Evolve a turn sooner. They also
don’t trigger coming-into-play Abilities or Ancient
Traits. This means Timer Ball isn’t really
able to replace them where they are already used.
Heavy Ball
can get anything with a Retreat Cost of [CCC] or more
from your deck while Level Ball can get anything
that has 90 or less HP; both are more likely to
supplement Ultra Ball than anything else.
If the deck has a lot of Evolutions and was
primarily using Heavy Ball or Level Ball
to get a particular Evolution, you might switch to
Timer Ball, but I am more used to seeing these two
used in decks where many Pokémon of all Stages are legal
targets. Repeat Ball is mostly geared towards
swarm decks, as it can snag anything you already have in
play (Basic or Evolution), but is useless if you don’t
need another copy of something. It isn’t likely to
be used on its own for this reason, so shifting from
other search option and Repeat Ball to a
Basic Pokémon focused search option and Timer Ball
might be an improvement. Hoopa-EX (XY:
Ancient Origins 36/98, 89/98; XY: Black Star
Promos XY71) and Winona can grab multiple
targets, and they can be Basic or Evolved Pokémon, but
Hoopa-EX uses its “Scoundrel Ring” Ability, which
can grab up to three Pokémon-EX, while Winona is
a Supporter restricted to Colorless Pokémon. So
once again, not really competition for Timer Ball
because they only overlap partially.
Then we get to the
really deck-specific search, like attacks and Abilities
that only grab one specific Pokémon (or at least the
Evolutions of one specific Pokémon), or which are combos
appropriate only to really one Type… like Battle
Compressor plus Revitalizer for Grass Types.
That being said, Timer Ball may worm its way into
some Standard Grass Type decks due to Forest of Giant
Plants and the usual draw support; if you are
ripping through your own deck and can Evolve
into stuff, right away, it might work. Then again,
the most likely candidates involve Vileplume (XY:
Ancient Origins 3/98); while normally one would want
to run light on Items because they’ll be dead-in-hand
once Vileplume hits the field, many builds run
several Item cards but are trying for a reliable,
first turn Vileplume. As you are using
cards like Shaymin-EX (XY: Roaring Skies
77/108, 106/108) to help do this, the Ultra Ball
discard and reliability are probably better than
Timer Ball, or you might even give Shiinotic
a try. So with all that said, I think Timer
Ball is a general card that plays at being a niche
card. Its future (maybe even its present) is far
from hopeless; it does a decent job in most Evolution
decks, but simply isn’t the optimal play.
This may seem like
I’m about to go on a tangent, but I promise it swings
back around to connect to the topic at hand. Timer
Ball reminds be of Dual Ball, a card still
legal for the PTCGO-exclusive Legacy Format. Dual
Ball celebrates its 15th birthday this September,
and it has almost the exact same effect as Timer Ball,
except it grabs Basic Pokémon, not Evolutions. Dual
Ball rotated out of Standard play in September of
2012, and it didn’t become a potent play until (I think)
2011. Card pool and game rules shifted around so
that suddenly the metagame liked an Item that
would probably snag one Basic and might snag two, even
if it also might whiff completely. Dual Ball
isn’t a must run in the Legacy Format, but it definitely
has a niche in certain decks, usually alongside Ultra
Ball. Timer Ball may have to wait until such
thing happens for it, but I am not sure if the odds are
in its favor. The thing is, almost all decks
need to get their Basic Pokémon to the field, and
they don’t have to worry about waiting to Evolve.
Just fielding your Basics can help thin your deck, so
that your normal draw power is more likely to hit the
Evolutions you’ll need next turn. This makes me
wonder if circumstances will ever be right for Timer
Ball, and I think it helps illustrate how being
almost identical does not always produce equal results.
Ratings
Standard:
2/5
Expanded:
1.75/5
Limited:
3.25/5
Theme:
3.25/5
Conclusion
Possibly, Timer
Ball performs far better than I think, but for
Standard and Expanded play, I don’t think enough decks
need quantity over reliability, even in the face of
things like the two card discard cost of Ultra Ball.
Expanded is the same, except decks have more options.
In Limited and Theme Deck play, Timer Ball can be
a blessing or a bitter disappointment, as drawing into
other search options or the actual cards needed is
usually much more difficult here. In turn, that
means whiffing is that much worse, while double “heads”
can be that much better.
Timer Ball
is the final runner-up from our Top 10 countdown for
Sun & Moon. If the list was extended to
include Timer Ball, it would be our 19th place
pick. It earned one voting point, so it only just
made one reviewer’s list. It wasn’t me, but I do
understand the pick; before realizing the differences
between it and Dual Ball (and their respective
metagames), I was much more excited for the card.
In hindsight, it might still have deserved to make the
list more than some of our other picks as well.
Plus, it did score only one point lower than 18th place,
Solgaleo-GX.
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