aroramage |
Man, you don't write for three
weeks, and everything just gets all kinds of wonky! What
can I say, just gotta get back into the swing of things~
Speaking of wonky things, Olympia!
She's basically a Switch and a Potion in the form of a
Supporter. She's got her uses, I don't know if I'd rank
her much higher than I did before.
Rating
Standard: 4/5 (guess there was some use of her
somewhere)
Expanded: 4/5 (pretty good stuff overall)
Limited: N/A (still don't know how you rank this in
Limited...still say 5/5)
Arora Notealus: I mean really, this
was the #2 card in its set, I don't think it oughta get
a lower rating simply because it hasn't been seen that
much.
Next Time: Time to wrangle them!
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Otaku |
Our fourteenth
finisher is Olympia (Generations 66/83),
which we first reviewed
here
as the second best card from its expansion. This
is a Supporter that allows you to switch your Active
Pokémon with one of your Benched Pokémon, then heals 30
damage from the former Active. Due to the wording,
if you don’t move your Active to the Bench, you don’t
get any healing. You only get to use one Supporter
per turn, but on the bright side no recent Supporter
blocking effects have proven worthwhile in the long run
and when Items are working, we’ve got VS
Seeker to reclaim a Supporter from the discard pile.
Olympia is basically a combo card, having the
same effect as Switch followed by Potion,
under the condition you heal the card you moved to the
Bench. This sounds kind of restrictive, and if you
read that old review, you’ll see I didn’t think much of
it. It didn’t come close to making my own list,
which was a Top 5 (it was a mostly reprint set; we ended
up only doing a Top 3). On the other hand,
aroramage thought quite highly of the card. In
hindsight he was proven correct; I’m not sure about the
numerical score but the rest he nailed; turns out having
a Supporter that is an enhanced version of Switch
was and is indeed worth it in some decks, and at least
functional in most others. My bad!
So how did I
go wrong? I underestimated all the stuff
Olympia does and overestimated its competition.
As far as Supporter cards to get your Active out of the
way, all we really had (and in Expanded play, still
have) is AZ; this allows you to return one of
your in play Pokémon to your hand, including your
Active. If you do, all attached cards are
discarded; for Pokémon consisting of more than one card
(like Evolved Pokémon), all of those cards are still
returned to hand. Between with and various Item
cards like Escape Rope, Switch, Float
Stone, Super Scoop Up, and even a few other
options I did not think Olympia was worth it even
as TecH. I was wrong! There were
things like Evolutions you did not want to bounce but
still wanted a Supporter to move; Mega Evolutions in
particular were painful to bounce because one way or
another, any Spirit Link card already used was
lost. In fact, other Tools played a role; though
not available at the time, now it can be nice getting
something with a Fighting Fury Belt attached out
of the Active slot, while healing a little damage off of
it, instead of bouncing it and losing all cards attached
with AZ.
Ratings
Standard:
3.75/5
Expanded:
3.5/5
Limited:
4/5
Summary:
Olympia ended up being a good, valuable addition
to the Standard and Expanded card pools; she is a bit
more useful to contemporary Standard play due Expanded
having more alternatives. She is functional in
general, and quite useful to a few key decks; in short
she achieved what I expected Ninja Boy, our
19th place
finisher,
would accomplish (but didn’t).
Olympia
tied with
yesterday’s
Zygarde-EX in voting points; both earned four,
none of which came from me. I am happy Olympia
made our “extended” Top 10 (Top 19) list, though.
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