aroramage |
Hitting our next spot on the list
is...Passimian? Alright, well, it's a decent enough card
I suppose. Let's take a look at it.
Fling does 1-for-30 to a Benched
Pokemon...alright, moving on.
Team Play's the appealing aspect of
this card, as while it starts out at 2-for-10, it adds
on 30 more damage for each Benched Passimian you have.
Initially that's an okay start, as you can get up to 100
damage for just 2 Energy. On top of that, it's easy to
bring them out with Nest Ball now, and don't forget that
he's got access to Strong Energy thanks to the reprint
back in Fates Collide. So it won't be surprising if a
deck comes out focusing on this.
My main problem with such a deck,
then, isn't about amassing your Passimian onto the field
to trample over your opponent's Pokemon - which at 100
damage a hit can 2HKO a lot of Pokemon just shy of
Mega-EX and some Pokemon-GX. No, my problem is with
keeping them on the field. At 110 HP, Passimian isn't
going to get too easily trampled, but he does run shy of
what I consider to be the magic number of 120 - which is
when most Pokemon will get 2HKO'd, although that might
climb up to 130, which doesn't make it any easier for
our simian friend. On top of that, he does have Psychic
Weakness, a popular pick since M Mewtwo-EX is still
hanging around the format with the likes of Trevenant
BREAK.
Still, credit where credit's due -
you get out your field of Passimian quick enough, and
you can rush down a lot of decks that are still working
to set-up. Combined with Strong Energy and a full field,
you can hit a lot of Pokemon for 120-140 damage easily
for just 2 Energy in total. Passimian is gonna want to
go fast - so be prepared to see that aggro deck.
Rating
Standard: 3.5/5 (Passimian wants to
go fast, and if you build your deck right, he'll go
faster than anything)
Expanded: 4/5 (heck, in Expanded,
he'll have access to a lot of Fighting support to really
rack up the damage)
Limited: 4/5 (the loss of that
support makes him okay, but in a format like this
alongside Nest Ball, he ought to do well)
Arora Notealus: Passimian is the
first example of a rush-based strategy here in the
Sun&Moon format, and hopefully we'll be able to see
bigger and better ones along the way. Will they revolve
around non-evolving Basics that aren't GX? Will they
beat out the EX and GX forces? Or will they be a phase?
Who knows? Only time will tell...
Next Time: Out from the sky, the
moon shines bright on this Pokemon.
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Otaku |
Our seventh place finisher is Passimian (SM:
Black Star Promos SM12; Sun & Moon 73/149),
another new Gen VII Pokémon. It is a Fighting
Type, which means it can tap some excellent support,
though as is usually the case, much of it is Expanded
only now. Looking ahead, some of what remains may
not be worth using alongside Passimian so no
sense going into details we may not need.
Similarly, the Fighting Type has a few Energy based
tricks and some supporting Pokémon (that aren’t Type
exclusive) that further bulk up the Type support, but
Passimian may not be making use of them for reasons
I’ll explain later. Fighting Type counters exist
in both Standard and Expanded play, but don’t see a lot
of use because, like most Type-specific counters, their
focus is too narrow to be practical. Fighting
Resistance is one of the most common, but a total
lack of Resistance outstrips it, and dealing with
Resistance is as simple as shifting to an alternate
attacker, or stacking an extra 20 damage onto your
attack. It can still mess you up, but it isn’t a
huge problem. Good for Passimian is that
Fighting Weakness can be a huge problem; many Colorless
Pokémon, most Darkness, and most Lightning Types are
Fighting Weak, though the exceptions to these patterns
are more prominent than the norm in the competitive
sphere. The Fighting Type may only just be hanging
in there in terms of competitive play, but it may be the
Type that actually has the most going for it; we’ll see
if Passimian can cash in on any of this.
Passimian
is a Basic Pokémon; that means minimum deck space
required, minimum time to hit the field, can be your
opening Active, often naturally better with various
effects than Evolutions, and there is even some
fantastic Stage support for them. The only
drawbacks to being a Basic Pokémon are externally
imposed; there are multiple counters that apply only to
them. Passimian has 110 HP, low enough that your
typical deck will OHKO it, provided that deck has its
main strategy up and running. It isn’t so low as
to be an easy OHKO, Passimian just doesn’t have
enough HP to be likely to avoid going down in one hit;
at least it is large enough that Fighting Fury Belt
should make a noticeable difference. Psychic
Weakness is dangerous, though perhaps not as bad as it
seems. Those Psychic Types already going for brute
force likely already OHKO the 110 HP, so what really
matters is helping them out when they’ve had a bad
start, or when you are dealing with the more technical
Psychic Type attacks not focused on damage (but still
doing some). Passimian lacks Resistance, which
is typical and only a minor missed opportunity, so we’ll
move onto the Retreat Cost of [C]; easy to pay both
upfront and later in the game, at least usually.
With the other stats and the attacks, I don’t think it
is likely you’ll be retreating all that often.
That is right, “attacks”: Passimian has no
Abilities but does have two attacks. The first is
“Fling”, which costs [F] and does 30 damage to the
opposing Benched Pokémon of your choice. The
damage return is decent for the Energy, and sometimes
hitting the Bench is amazing, but Passimian is
hurt by the attack being unable to hit something in the
opponent’s Active slot. An adequate attack, I
would say. The second attack is “Team Play”, which
does 10 damage plus 30 per Passimian on your
Bench, so 10, 40, 70, or 100 damage. While not a
massive amount of damage, the cost is just [CC]; it is
only truly bad when Passimian is on its own (the
10 damage), though to use well you’ll want to have two
or three Passimian on your Bench. Therein
lies the rub, I think; if you have any
Passimian in your Prizes, your damage output drops.
Obviously, if all three are stuck there, you better hope
you have an alternate attacker or that Fling will prove
surprisingly useful. Even just one drops you down
to a max base damage of 70 for Team Play, though, while
two is almost as hopeless as having just one.
So we have a small Basic Pokémon attacker that likes to
swarm but is vulnerable to copies of itself being
Prized. How did it make any personal top 10 lists,
then, let alone the final overall countdown? Passimian
already has a budget deck that has proven competitive. Not
“New best deck in the game!” competitive, but good for a
deck mostly build around Uncommons and Commons.
The deck usually relies upon Double Colorless Energy
to fuel your attack needs; sure an opponent can discard
them easily, but most decks discard the Double
Colorless Energy by simply KOing the Passimian
to which it is attached. Max Elixir may also be
used if you prefer relying more on basic Energy. Nest
Ball and Revive are big helps to field your
initial Passimian team and reclaiming the fallen.
The first big “combo”, however, is using Mew (XY:
Fates Collide 29/124). Yes, this is a holo
rare, which does not seem like a budget card.
Unless you run this with Shaymin-EX (XY:
Roaring Skies 77/108, 106/108), then Mew will
be the rarest card in the deck. So what does
Mew do? While it is an even easier OHKO, it
allows you to
-
Exploit Psychic Weakness
-
Attack with up to four
Passimian on the Bench
So if nothing is Prized and you get all your
Passimian into play, Mew can do 130 with Team
Play, and all those times you can only manage three
total Passimian in play, Mew is still
doing 100 for [CC]. In Expanded play, you might
even use Dimension Valley to allow it to attack
for just [C], but I’ve never seen anyone do that.
I said that Shaymin-EX wasn’t required for the
deck; you can run it if you have it, and that
might be the best way, but Oranguru (SM: Black
Star Promos SM13; Sun & Moon 113) can work
well here. The deck tends to avoid a lot of cards
that can clutter up your hand; it does still
happen, but this is a deck where you have a better
chance of getting down to under three cards, allowing
you to make use of the “Instruct” Ability on Oranguru.
Instruct may be used once per turn before you attack, so
even though each use can draw three cards at most, and
probably just one or two, it adds up over the course of
the game. Oranguru is also a decent attacker,
having “Psychic” for [CCC], which does 60 damage plus 20
per Energy attached to the opponent’s Active. It
cannot exploit Weakness, but Mew can; this also
makes Dimension Valley a little more appealing as
an Expanded Format Stadium choice, but I haven’t been
playing much Expanded lately so, again, I haven’t seen
it done. Two other cards worth mentioning are
Town Map and Rotom Dex, the latter being
another card from this set. These just make it
easier to deal with Passimian stuck in your
Prizes.
Passimian
is unlikely to pull off OHKOs, but it looks like it
could be effective at the 2HKO strategy, with OHKO’s
when Weakness cooperates. Its relative simplicity,
speed, and capacity to get by without some of the more
expensive cards in the format make me think that it will
be around for at least a little while. Meet the
new aggressive budget deck for Standard play, maybe for
Expanded play as well. It begs for experimentation
I think: I haven’t heard of anyone partnering it with
Vespiquen (XY: Ancient Origins 10/98), but
simple partnerships like that could take Passimian
far. Even a single Passimian can be handy
in Limited Play, due to the Bench snipe (assuming you
can run a source of [F] Energy for it). Limited
play does not have the four-per-deck rule; as
long as a card doesn’t specify an amount (like Ace Spec
cards did), you may run as many as you pull, so long as
your Limited Format deck contains exactly 40 cards.
So one Passimian is still nice, 4+ is insane…
what about 2-3? Still good; what I said about
Fling still applies, and though the hits won’t be
massive, most attackers don’t hit as hard in Limited
play. You can get a taste of that in the Theme
Deck Format found on the PTCGO: the Theme Deck “Roaring
Heat” includes two Passimian.
Ratings
Standard:
3.8/5
Expanded:
3.7/5
Limited:
3.9/5
Theme:
3.5/5
Summary:
I cannot quite bring myself to give Passimian a
four-out-of-five in any format, but is approaching that
level of play. If Prize cards weren’t there to
threaten your setup, this might become the new go-to
2HKO deck.
Passimian
earned 10 voting points, tying with tomorrow’s sixth
place finisher. On my own list, I had Passimian
in 6th place, but seventh may be more accurate.
Just one less point, and we would have ended up with a
four-way tie for 7th through 10th place (instead of the
actual three-way tie), while one more point and it would
have been a tie between 5th and 6th instead of 6th and
7th.
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