21times |
Olivia
(Burning Shadows, 119/147) makes her debut in the
Pokemon Trading Card Game in the Burning Shadows
expansion set.
She allows you to search your deck for any two
Pokemon GX and put them in your hand.
Olivia
now forms a triumvirate of early play cards that we can
access thanks to
Tapu Lele GX’s (Guardians Rising, 60/145)
Wonder Tag
ability.
The two other Supporter cards
in this triangle:
Brigette (Breakthrough, 134/162) and
Pokemon Fan Club
(Fates Collide, 107/124).
Brigette
has seen tremendous usage since the release of GUR
– it has become a common tactic to use
Tapu Lele GX
to grab Brigette
on turn one to put three Basic Pokemon on your bench to
quickly start building your evolutionary lines for your
Stage 1 and 2 Pokemon.
Pokemon Fan
Club has also significantly increased in popularity
(albeit maybe not
quite as much as
Brigette) as
it can also be used to grab any two
Basic Pokemon
and put them in your hand.
This is significant as
Brigette
requires you to put them directly on the bench, meaning
grabbing something like
Tapu Lele GX
would not allow you to activate its
Wonder Tag
ability. If
you have multiple non-Basic GX Pokemon in your deck,
however, then
Olivia can expedite the development of these
evolutionary lines.
Fan Club
also has a place in many decks as it allows you to get
Lele and put it in your hand so you could potentially use it next
turn. It
also could grab an EX Pokemon should you need one (Brigette
can only grab a single EX
or any
combination of three Basic GX / regular Pokemon).
Olivia
steps in and lets you grab a pair of
GX Pokemon
regardless of what Stage they might be.
You could grab two
Metagross GX (Guardians
Rising, 85/145) or
Ho-Oh GX (Burning
Shadows, 21/147) and
Salazzle GX (Burning
Shadows, 25/147) or even
Tapu Lele and any other GX you need (thereby ensuring you have a
Supporter for the following turn).
I could
definitely see
Olivia serving as the follow up play behind either
Fan Club or
Brigette… but
I haven’t yet.
This month I am not tracking my
stats like I normally do, so I can’t tell you exactly
how many matches I’ve played so far since BUS,
but I’m pretty sure I’ve played more than a hundred
matches in the slightly more than a week that BUS
has been out, and I don’t think I’ve seen
Olivia played
by my opponents even a single time.
I’ve tried it out with all of the decks I’ve been
testing for the reviews this week, and it definitely has
a place as a one of in these sixty card lists.
It’s not a great card, and I would say that its
best usage would be early in the game to complete
evolutionary lines.
For example, you would
Brigette turn one and then
Olivia turn two or three.
I didn’t find myself using it every game, but I
definitely chose to
Lele for it enough to say that it’s a valuable asset to your sixty
card list
Rating
Standard: 3 out of 5
Conclusion
Olivia
might be one of those sleeper cards that we all overlook
until someone plays it on stream at a major tournament
and we all realize that this is a great situational
card. I
don’t think it will ever be more than a one of in decks,
and it definitely relies on the more precision based
draw strategy that is becoming more prevalent in the
game (i.e. playing
Brigette instead of Professor
Sycamore (Steam Siege, 114/114), so it might
not function as well in decks that are more reliant on
pure splash draw support.
Still, it wouldn’t surprise me if this card sees
more and more usage as people discover the value of its
utility. It
just might take some time (and some big game exposure)
for this to happen.
|
Vince |
So after doing the countdown of the top 10 cards lost
to set rotation, we find ourselves with another top 10
countdown, this time regarding cards in SM Burning
Shadows that might have potential. I guess I might
consider those cards “first impressions” (pun intended).
As we progress throughout the year, when we re-review a
card, we should have already known how well these cards
perform.
Kicking off with the 10th best card is Olivia. She’s
the Kahuna of Akala Island who gives you a Rockenium Z
after you defeat her, as well as giving you a second
stamp on the trainer passport, allowing traded Pokemon
to obey you up to Level 50. In the TCG, however, upon
looking at the effect, there’s no relation between the
TCG and the video games; I thought it would somewhat
support Fighting types (rock types in the games is
represented as Fighting types in the TCG). So what does
she do instead?
Search your deck for 2 Pokemon GX and put it on your
hand.
Well…that’s surprising! She turns out to be a good
search card! Pokemon GX can be Basic, Stage 1, or Stage
2, so fetching these out will let you put down a Basic
GX from your hand to the bench or getting Stage 1 or
Stage 2 Pokemon to evolve it to the final stage either
manually or Rare Candy.
I don’t know how many copies will suffice, but at
least not only you search your deck for 2 Pokemon, you
would also thin your deck as well as avoiding fueling
Trashalanche’s damage output. This is a must run in
Limited unless you have no GX Pokemon to use.
Ratings:
Standard (pre-rotation): 3/5 (narrow in scope, but
does one thing very well)
Standard (post-rotation): 3/5
Expanded: 3/5 (GX Pokemon debuted in Sun & Moon, so I
don’t think the increased card pool would affect her in
this format.)
Limited: 5/5
Summary: Though it’s a specialized search card, she
will see play because GX is still a new mechanic and
will be seeing play to some degree. However, if we
resort to raw draw power and item based search, then I
fear there’s no need for Olivia. Maybe she needs a
slower format. Olivia took 10th place with 8 voting
points, which feels like quite low. But then again, if
other cards were ranked very highly, then there’s little
room for other cards to squeeze in (which would fall
under honorable mentions category). The 9th place pick
had 13 voting points, five points over her. I didn’t
have her on my personal top 10 list.
|
Otaku |
Welcome to our
countdown of the 10 most promising cards of SM:
Burning Shadows, the latest expansion which
officially becomes legal for organized play August 18th
(this Friday). Yes, we just finished our
rotation based top 10 list, counting down the cards
we’ll miss once the 2017-2018 Standard Format goes into
effect on September 1st. Yes, the World
Championship is also this weekend. Yes,
we’ve followed the usual guidelines when compiling this
list; each reviewer submitted his own personal top 10,
based on his own criteria for what is “good”, I assigned
“voting points” based on how each card ranked on each
respective list, then added it all together to get the
official Pojo list. Reprints, as usual, were
not allowed unless we thought them
particularly relevant. So let us begin with our
10th place finisher, Olivia (SM: Burning
Shadows 119/147)!
Olivia
is a Trainer-Supporter whose effect allows you to search
your deck for up to two Pokémon-GX, show them to your
opponent, add them to your hand, and finally shuffle
your deck. I haven’t had any hands-on experience
with this card yet, so I’m going to resort to some
Theorymon… and some math. For those who can’t
stand math at all… you shouldn’t be reading this anyway;
most TCGs involve at least a little math. For
those who struggle with it, I’ll try to explain things
in other terms as well, so don’t worry. In math,
there is something known as the “Transitive Property of
Equality”, usually represented as “If a=b and b=c, then
a=c.” Another way to think of it is that “If 1+3=4 and
2+2=4, then 1+3=2+2.” To some extent, we may
apply this to cards in the Pokémon TCG. Why
“some”; shouldn’t it either work or not work for
understanding the game? The issue is that I will
be looking at only a few cards, but to truly do
this would require dealing with the entire card
pool. Plus, it still wouldn’t be able to account
for player tastes and the like skewing the results (even
if only due to unconscious bias). Even if two
cards produce equal results in isolation, the
specifics of how they do it can matter when filtered
through the entire card pool, such as how many
Supporters that didn’t perform well when first
introduced became much better after the release of VS
Seeker or because anti-Item measures suddenly
made a Supporter-based option viable (if not
preferable). So let us compare Olivia to
some of the other Pokémon search Supporters, and then to
other forms of Pokémon search, to get an idea of how she
stacks up; I won’t be mentioning how these cards require
you show your opponent what you picked and to shuffle
your deck, as this is universal to such effects.
We’ll start with
the simplest first, even if it is a bit obscure:
Trevor. He allows you to search out and add
any one Pokémon to your hand. He released during
the XY-era, so it is possible power creep (or the more
rare power crunch) could apply, but if either does I
would expect the former as Trevor never really
saw much play, let alone competitive success; though
some of it could be attributed to its availability, I am
convinced it is because other options were preferable.
A direct comparison suggests that being a Pokémon-GX is
enough of a restriction to warrant doubling the
card yield. Next, let us consider Pokémon Fan
Club; while it originally released in Aquapolis
with a slightly different effect, the most recent
version is from XY: Fates Collide, and thus only
15 months older than Olivia. Pokémon Fan Club
allows you to search your deck for up to two Basic
Pokémon, then add them to your hand. Basic Pokémon
tend to be important even to Evolution decks, and are
still the strongest current Stage due to their speed and
reduced resource cost relative to Evolutions, and being
restricted to just them gives Pokémon Fan Club
the same double search as being restricted to Pokémon-GX
grants Olivia. Pokémon Fan Club has seen
some competitive success over the last 15 months as
well, but some of that involves specific search
targets, like Shaymin-EX (XY: Roaring Skies
77/108/, 106/108). You could fetch any one Basic
your deck needed and then pick a Shaymin-EX for
added draw. There were a few other similar combos
as well… and they won’t apply to Olivia because
they don’t involve Pokémon-GX. Not that Pokémon
Fan Club will be able to search out Shaymin-EX
for much longer.
The last two
Supporters we’ll consider are Winona and
Brigette. Both snag up to three Pokémon from
your deck, instead of just one or two; Winona may
only grab Colorless-Types while Brigette is a bit
more complicated. Brigette gives you a choice
between picking one Basic Pokémon-EX or three
Basic non-Pokémon-EX. The final difference between
Brigette and the rest (including Winona)
is that Brigette plays your picks directly from
deck to the field, so it cannot trigger coming-into-play
Abilities like “Setup” (the Ability on Shaymin-EX).
Even though they get two more Pokémon than Trevor
and one more than Olivia and Pokémon Fan Club,
these cards haven’t had a lot of success. Winona
saw some at first but was replaced by other options. Brigette
didn’t see much success until Pokémon-GX started showing
up; Basic Pokémon-GX are on par (possibly better) than
Basic Pokémon-EX, so this created an exploit with the
card. Brigette was supposed to be balanced by
not being able to grab multiples of the strongest
Basics, but now she can. So now it is time to
address the elephant in the room; none of the
Supporters I’ve mentioned are the go-to source of
Pokémon search. Instead, the best examples are
Item-based.
The
Pokémon search card is Ultra Ball; you have to
discard two cards from hand but then you get the
same unrestricted search as Trevor. There
are many cards in the “Ball” family; so many that
even though the rest are more specialized, they tend to
each have at least a small niche in competitive play.
It also suggests that being a Supporter is really only
worth a discard cost of two cards from hand, at least
before we get into effect specifics that might be broken
by going from a once-per-turn Supporter to an Item.
An older example that is no longer as good is
Ability based; the card that replaced Winona
was Hoopa-EX (XY: Ancient Origins 36/98,
89/98; XY: Black Star Promos XY71). Its
“Scoundrel Ring” Ability lets you add three
Pokémon-EX from deck to hand, except for
Hoopa-EX. If you need multiple Pokémon-EX, it
is still a good card, but even though it will survive
rotation due to the promo version, its days are numbered
instead because decks are including more and more
Pokémon-GX. So why bring it up at all?
Before we get to the hypothetical, it is an example of
another card that Pokémon Fan Club could exploit;
you had to be careful not to clutter up your hand, but
this allowed your one Supporter to fetch three
Pokémon-EX of your choice (Basic or Mega Evolution)
and draw until you had six cards in hand. You
just needed to have room in your deck and on your Bench
for Hoopa-EX and Shaymin-EX, and of
course, for Abilities to be working.
Olivia
does not seem all that great a Supporter to me at
present unless you’re worried about setting up a
Pokémon-GX deck while under Item lock or while avoiding
too many Items so as not to feed the “Trashalanche”
attack of Garbodor (SM: Guardians Rising
51/145). Post-rotation, Standard Format play
loses the current big name in Item lock - Vileplume
(XY: Ancient Origins 3/98) - and might be
losing the support - Double Dragon Energy -
needed so that Noivern-GX can assume the throne.
I think her future depends on circumstances that may or
may not manifest. The following are neither
mutually inclusive nor exclusive:
-
Items remain a liability for many
Pokémon-GX heavy decks or decks in
general.
-
Items do not remain a liability
but non-Supporter forms of Basic
Pokémon search make Olivia a
bargain in a format with a heavy Evolved
Pokémon-GX focus.
-
Additional Basic Pokémon-GX are released
that make searching out two of them well
worth your Supporter.
These could also
apply to the Expanded Format, though I am focused upon
Standard play. The third point could use a bit
more explanation; right now, you can use Olivia
to fetch Tapu Lele-GX plus another Pokémon-GX.
As long as you’ve got some room on your Bench and the
other Pokémon-GX is worthwhile, it is like Olivia
replaces itself with your choice of Supporter!
This is where Shaymin-EX and Hoopa-EX are
useful as examples of what could be; we don’t
have any such cards now, but Tapu Lele-GX is
already a better version of Jirachi-EX, as
it has the same great Ability, just under a different
name and attached to significantly worse stats
and lone attack. In other words, if we get some
more useful draw or search Abilities attached to
Basic Pokémon-GX (possibly even Evolved ones), it
could make Olivia quite the bargain.
For now, though, niche usage in Standard and Expanded
Format play, if even that. I’m not sure if she has
an edge in Standard (because it will focus more on
Pokémon-GX by necessity) or in Expanded (where there are
more delightful combos like Battle Compressor
with VS Seeker). Enjoy using her in the
Limited Format; you might even include her as
another way of looking at and then shuffling your deck,
even if you can’t run any Pokémon-GX. Probably
not, though.
Ratings
Standard:
2/5
Expanded:
2/5
Limited:
3.5/5
Conclusion
Olivia
strikes me as a bit early to the party; yes, we actually
had our first Pokémon-GX before Sun & Moon had
released but we are only three sets into the
mechanic, and still have quite a bit of the previous
generation’s sets running around. I think she’ll
become better with time as she’ll have more and more
targets, not diminishing until something better comes
along (power creep) or the next gimmick supplants
Pokémon-GX (you know it’ll happen eventually).
As I am not running the decks where she’d be the
most use at present, I’ll also add that I could
be grossly underrating her.
Breakdown
Once again, we
enjoyed five different lists with which to the
official site list; Olivia obtained 10th place
with eight voting points, beating out a three-way tie
we had for 11th through 13th place. She only
appeared on one of our reviewer’s individual top 10
lists, however, and it wasn’t mine. Though I
wasn’t as detailed as I prefer to be, I still went
through the entire set when making my personal Top 10,
and actually ended up with a Top 25 that Olivia
still didn’t make. All that said, I’m
actually not bothered by her making the list.
I think she does have future potential, and I
even expect to see her because she appears to already
have her own mini-fandom.
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