Otaku |
Bursting Balloon
was originally reviewed
here
by both myself and aroramage. When your opponent’s
Active Pokémon attacks and does damage to your Active
Pokémon, this Pokémon Tool will place six damage
counters on said opposing Active Pokémon. Bursting
Balloon also discards itself at the end of your
opponent’s next turn. So this is yet another card
where I didn’t see its potential at first, though if you
went back to read my initial review I sang its praises
because players far better than myself had already
proven Bursting Balloon in competitive play.
Previous releases like Rocky Helmet and Rock
Guard, which operate in a similar manner, had
relatively little success. I have a dim
recollection of some deck for a time making use of
Rocky Helmet, but I could be mistaken in that regard
and maybe it never worked out. Rock Guard on the
other hand surprised me by proving vicious in
Seismitoad-EX decks; prior to that it was another
budget Ace Spec, the kind you ran because you couldn’t
afford something better. With Seismitoad-EX
decks focused on sufficient control/disruption to
prevent OHKOs and then spamming Super Scoop Up to
bounce an injured Seismitoad-EX (and its Rock
Guard) back into hand, the only way it wasn’t
effective is if your opponent ran (and could spare)
Xerosic to discard it or was already in such
a state that they couldn’t attack Seismitoad-EX
anyway.
So what about Bursting Balloon? Why is it
doing so much better than Rock Guard and Rocky
Helmet? None of these three have additional
attachment restrictions, but as you should have already
guessed Rocky Helmet doesn’t do enough to really
prove worthwhile, even before it had to compete with
Muscle Band. Even more obvious is that Rock
Guard suffered for being an Ace Spec; besides giving
up a slot that could have gone to greats such as
Computer Search, Dowsing Machine, Life Dew,
Scoop Up Cyclone, and Scramble Switch,
being a single copy there was a risk of it being Prized
or discarded and proving too costly (or impossible) to
reclaim and reuse. Bursting Balloon can be run
as a full four count like Rocky Helmet but packs
the punch of Rock Guard, placing enough damage
counters to score a KO against the smallest attackers
(like those used by Night March decks) and shave a turn
off of the survival time for most everything else when
combined with a sufficient attacker. With full on
combos, you might even speed an opponent’s Active to the
discard pile two or three turns more quickly! Now
what tripped me up wasn’t the fact that there were three
conditions for Bursting Balloon to Active (being
attached to your Active, opponent’s Active attacking,
that attack doing damage), but because Bursting
Balloon would discard itself at the end of your
opponent’s turn. Turns out that wasn’t a flaw but
a feature. This allowed you to slap it onto
a Pokémon for a turn of either protection or damage
counter placement, and then replace it with a
different Pokémon Tool the next turn. Eco Arm
meant if you wanted to spam Bursting Balloon over
and over again, you could try that approach as well.
Bursting Balloon
is not the best Tool for any and all decks, but
it’s functional in all of them, and more than
just minimally. Your opponent has to find a way to
attack around it, or burn a Tool discarding effect on a
card that goes away at the end of his or her current
turn. This makes Bursting Balloon a kind of
pressure card; pressure cards are designed to distract
the opponent and force a penalty on them; either
suffering ill effects stated on the card or
having to use up a resource in dealing with it.
That still doesn’t put it up over mainstay Tools like
Fighting Fury Belt, Float Stone, or Muscle
Band in most decks. There are also deck
specific Tools like Spirit Link cards that you’ll
need to run before Bursting Balloon. Good
thing it can play nice with all these other Tools; if
you’re not up and attacking, retreating, Mega Evolving,
etc. that turn, you can just slap a Bursting Balloon
down for a turn of pressure on your opponent. Now
in addition to this solid foundation of general usage,
Bursting Balloon has a more niche usage as well.
Mostly in Standard play, where your opponent can’t try
to eliminate it alongside other Tools with mass or
multi-Tool removal like Startling Megaphone and
Tool Scrapper (respectively), and where
Muscle Band is no longer an option for upping the
offense of Evolutions. Greninja BREAK decks
probably provide the best contemporary example, and
wouldn’t you know that was our
number two pick
for our Top 10 Cards of 2016 list. I am less
familiar with its usage in Expanded play, but it still
seems like a solid option there, and it’s fabulous in
Limited play where your opponent will likely have no way
around it, nor are you likely to have an alternate Tool
to equip either.
Ratings
Standard:
4/5
Expanded:
3.75/5
Limited:
3.75/5
Summary:
Bursting Balloon is nearly as good as Fighting
Fury Belt in the Standard and Limited Formats, but
the competition and fact that your opponent has more and
more easily implemented methods of dealing with it in
Expanded hurts it more here. In both cases, the
constructed formats are not universal scores; general
usage would be about a point to a point-and-a-half
lower, but Bursting Balloon is much more
effective and useful in certain decks; in a select few
it is simply the best! The game is just so fast
paced right now that your opponent will rarely have a
better choice than crashing into it (severely injuring
his or her Pokémon) or expending significant resources
going around it.
Bursting Balloon
is the third card to receive only a single voting point,
like
19th place
Ninja Boy and
18th place
M Gardevoir-EX (XY: Steam Siege 79/114,
112/114). Ninja Boy hasn’t shown up much in top
decks, so it lost out to the other two; M Gardevoir-EX
appears to have come into its own, but besides being
last minute (for 2016) it also is a specific deck and
not one that is dominating all events. Bursting
Balloon isn’t a dominant force in all events, but it
isn’t a deck focus; I value general usage over deck
specific usage because normally that means the
former affects more of the metagame than the latter.
As for my personal Top 10, Bursting Balloon got
its single point from me as it was my 10th place pick.
I erroneously reported that Ninja Boy was my 10th
place pick at the end of that review because I simply
misread my own spreadsheet; the person next to me
had Ninja Boy as his 10th place pick. Ninja
Boy had been on the bottom of my list in an earlier
draft, so it wasn’t a total airhead moment. Just
really, really close. Like these three were to
tomorrow’s
16th place finisher, which had just three voting points.
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