aroramage |
Man,
now here's a flashback. Gym Challenge, wayyyyyyyyyy back
in the day. Talk about a different time. Really makes
you appreciate how old you are sometimes, you know?
Anywho, Rocket's Zapdos is interesting. He's got one of
the earliest Energy retrieval types of Abilities I can
even recall, outside of Mewtwo. Plasma is a 1-for-20
move that also attaches an Electric Energy in your
discard pile to Zapdos if you have any...yeah, older
wording would explain these sorts of things before they
didn't have to be explained. 20 damage in those days was
also a lot higher, as you might given that he's only got
70 HP himself.
Speaking of 70, that's how much Electroburn does! For
the time, it's reasonably priced at 4-for-70,
considering this could one-shot most of the available
Pokemon at the time, and it wasn't too bad since Plasma
could charge it faster with the aid of Professor Oak.
The main issue? The drawback is that Rocket's Zapdos
takes 10 damage for every Electric Energy attached to
him. It's already guaranteed to deal 30 damage back to
Zapdos, just based on the Electric Energy in the cost of
Electroburn, but assuming you're running it in a pure
Electric deck, it's likely to deal 40 - which is half of
Rocket Zapdos's HP.
...yeah, not worth it.
You
might get lucky enough to KO 2 of your opponent's
Pokemon before Rocket's Zapdos KOs itself, but if you're
not charging off of Plasma fast enough, you'll just end
up behind and start losing HP, limiting your usage of
Electroburn. Healing Trainer cards become essential
(there were no Items technically in those days), and you
have to be able to at least go 2-for-1 for the most
value out of him. Otherwise, you'll want to at least go
1-for-1 with Electroburn taking your opponent's Pokemon
out at the same time you lose Rocket's Zapdos.
But
at that point...I believe there are better Pokemon to
use.
Rating
Standard: N/A (it's like having a
Pokemon that halves it HP when it attacks)
Expanded: N/A (all just to deal its
HP back)
Limited: 3/5 (if it were an EX,
that'd be cool...but that wouldn't be worth half its HP)
Arora Notealus: If a card like
Rocket's Zapdos came out in today's modern game, I doubt
it would see play. Even some of the lower end cards that
don't see much play these days would do better than
Rocket's Zapdos. And that's mainly just cause of the
changes in designing cards, the power ceiling getting
raised higher and higher, and the damage outputs being
pushed upwards more and more. It's a very different
game, and cards like Rocket's Zapdos are even more
outdated for it.
Next Time: And to finish off our
Electric Week is...wait...you're not an Electric type!
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Otaku |
This Throwback
Thursday we’re traveling back to the early days of the
game. Not quite the earliest, but close to
it as we look at Rocket’s Zapdos (Gym
Challenge 15/132). Gym Challenge expansion
seventh expansion released in North America (yes, I
count Base Set 2), officially released on October
16, 2000; if you’re new to the game, this isn’t quite
two full years into the game and
the second ever Card of the Day, back when it was just Ness
doing the writing. Fair warning, while I often
am just struggling to remember what I experienced first
hand, or at least could put together after the fact,
that doesn’t apply here. For various reasons, I
know of this card’s glory days, but I don’t even have
good secondhand data, just thirdhand reading the reports
of others who saw it doing well… and were usually kids
who weren’t good at writing, weren’t good at the game,
or weren’t good at either. Still, there are enough
fundamentals I remember from the time that I think my
usual card vivisection ought to suffice. Something
to remember throughout this review is that
Rocket’s Zapdos entered the game in the Base Set
through Gym Challenge era of Unlimited Format
play, experienced the failure (?) that was Prop 15-3,
and eventually became part of the original “Rocket-On”
Modified Format of 2001-2002 that would mostly be
dominated by Feraligatr (Neo Genesis
5/111). I believe people kept using it throughout
but its glory days are from those early Unlimited
Format days.
Let us start with
the name: Rocket’s Zapdos is a Pokémon with an
“owner” in its name. As far as the game is
concerned, this means it is a totally separate entity
from “plain” Zapdos cards; you can have up to
four of each in your deck, and the only way an effect
applies to both of them is if the wording includes each
e.g. an effect that references Rocket’s Zapdos
would not apply to Zapdos and vice versa.
There are some cards that support “Rocket’s”
Pokémon but they actually released about four
years later long after this card was gone from the
Modified Format and (possibly) after its time being
competitive in the Unlimited Format. Rocket’s Zapdos
is a Lightning-Type at a time when there was barely any
proper Type-support and no real Type-counters, though
perhaps there were and they are just so bad I’m spacing
them off. It was a good Type for exploiting
Weakness, though; not as great as Fighting or Psychic,
but good. Resistance was a bit of a pain, though
not especially common. Being a Basic was still
the best back then, and for almost identical reasons;
fastest to the field, most space efficient, and a
natural synergy with various card effects and game
rules. I don’t recall if there was any Basic Stage
support, but there were Basic Stage counters and yet
the Stage was still the best.
70 HP was actually
the “magic number” back then. How? It was
the amount that made it very difficult for an opponent
to win via donk… and some of you may have no clue what
that term means. The short version is that
a donk occurs when a player wins on his or her first
turn by KOing the opponent’s only Pokémon in play.
Haymaker decks utilizing Electabuzz (Base Set
20/102; Base Set 2; 24/130; Best of Game
1, Platinum 128/127) and Hitmonchan (Base
Set 7/102; Base Set 2 8/130; Best of Game
2; Platinum 129/127) weren’t focused on the donk,
but often enough enjoyed a win due to it, as they
usually were packing up to four copies of PlusPower.
Actual donk decks would employ the one and only
Erika’s Jigglypuff, but it requires a Double
Colorless Energy to fuel its “Pulled Punch” attack
and three PlusPower. What about
bigger attacks? This was a time when [C] paid for
10 damage and [X] - non-[C] Energy requirement - bought
15 damage (rounded either up or down to the nearest
whole unit of 10). Energy Removal and Super
Energy Removal and/or Gust of Wind with a
OHKO made it hard to get an Evolution out and
attacking. Put the two together, and few
decks could reliably dole out 70 damage turn after turn.
120 HP was also the maximum printed HP for
everything, though scaling gets a bit iffy as there
weren’t mechanics like Pokémon-GX or Pokémon-EX at this
time.
Third paragraph
(fourth if I include the introduction) and we are only
just getting to the bottom stats; the joy of
explaining the game as it was 20 years ago, dear
readers. Rocket’s Zapdos had no Weakness,
and it might have been an even bigger deal back then
versus now because of almost everything we just
discussed with respect to HP. Fighting Resistance
-30 was significant back then; Haymaker was no
longer the king but it remained competitive and
popular. Hitmonchan was now second fiddle
but still there to help with early game damage output
and punish the Fighting Weak. Most
Lightning-Types - like fellow Haymaker alumni
Electabuzz - were Fighting Weak, so suddenly
Lightning-Type decks could stay on-Type but wall
against Fighting-Types. The Retreat Cost of [CC]
wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t chunky enough to be a major
issue; this was at a time when you still had Scoop Up
and Switch (at least, pre-Modified Format).
Even in Modified, you could use Warp Point (Escape
Rope by another name) to vacate the Active Position.
At last, we come to
this card’s attacks: “Plasma” for [L] and “Electroburn”
for [LLLC]. While it couldn’t make good use of
Double Colorless Energy, we have as inexpensive an
attack as we’d see at the time with as expensive an
attack as we’d see at that time, so at least we knew
Rocket’s Zapdos could start doing something
right away. 20-for-one is high-functioning filler right
now, barring good combos or a good effect, and Plasma
had both, for this attack allowed Rocket’s
Zapdos to do some damage while attaching a [L]
Energy from your discard pile to itself. Like now,
there weren’t any cards that provided [L] while in the
discard pile except basic Lightning Energy,
but unlike now, this was a great deal. Let’s
consider the differences; we’ve already established that
HP scores across the board were lower, damage output was
also lower, speed was faster because you could
attack first turn, and Energy Removal/Super
Energy Removal made Crushing Hammer (and
friends) seem like slackers. Now add to it that
most old-school Trainers are better than their
contemporary counterparts, largely because all
but Stadium cards (still quite new at this time) were
played like Item cards because this was before
Supporters. A few would have Supporter-like
restrictions built in, but most didn’t. Computer
Search and Item Finder (under the name
Dowsing Machine) were here but not Ace Specs.
Professor Juniper/Professor Sycamore was
also here, but as Professor Oak (and again,
played like an Item). Gust of Wind is Pokémon
Reversal sans the coin flip (or pre-errata,
if you prefer). Plenty of ways to get [L] Energy
into the discard pile, some of which belonged to your
opponent.
So Plasma was
great, but what about Electroburn? It did 70
damage, which is terrible by modern standards,
but pretty good back then. [LLLC] should buy
15+15+15+10 or 55 damage: Electroburn does 15 more than
that, so what’s the catch? Besides how I keep
warning you about Energy Removal and quick KO’s,
the attack makes Rocket’s Zapdos do 10 damage
times the number of [L] Energy cards attached to itself,
to itself! Nothing at this time could
provide [LLL] for a single Energy card, and while
you could use Electrode (Base Set 21/102;
Base Set 2 25/130) to provide [LL], giving up a
Prize to avoid doing 10 points of self-damage is more
than a little counterproductive. The trick here
was another Trainer that debuted in Base Set:
Defender. Like PlusPower (at the time),
it was a “normal” Trainer that attached to your Pokémon,
though it wasn’t restricted to just your Active.
As the name might suggest, this reduced the damage you
took from attacks (by Pokémon belonging to either
player). This card would soak 20 damage (after
Weakness/Resistance), and the effect lasted until
Defender discarded itself at the end of your
opponent’s next turn. So attach one of these to
Rocket’s Zapdos and Electroburn would only inflict
10 points of self-damage plus any attack made by
your opponent’s Pokémon against that Rocket’s
Zapdos would do 20 less; even with the self-damage
which got through, your opponent had to do 10 more
damage to break even! Then, in Neo Genesis
we got the original Special Energy version of Metal
Energy; unlike its final counterpart, this
version would soak 10 damage (per copy) when attached to
Pokémon of any Type (not just Metal) but if it
wasn’t a Metal-Type, then the attacks of that Pokémon
did 10 less damage.
…
That sounds like a
drawback, but it meant that a single Metal
Energy reduced your self-damage by 10, plus the
damage you took from an opponent’s attack by 10 while
Electroburn still did 60 damage; this was pretty slick
at the time! Neo Genesis also introduced
Focus Band and Gold Berry, so Rocket’s
Zapdos was in good shape in Unlimited. In
Modified, it lost so much of what it needed; even though
a partial replacement for Defender was there, it
now lacked Energy Removal and Super Energy
Removal to slow down or even prevent an opponent’s
heavy hitters from ever getting a chance to swing away…
which meant that even if it managed to fry a Totodile
or two first, sooner or later a Feraligatr would
get setup and begin to steamroll with its “Riptide”
attack, which usually could reliably and repeatedly
score OHKO’s, even within the constraints of the
cardpool. Even if the Rocket’s Zapdos
player took an early lead, I’m thinking the
Feraligatr player is catching up and then pulling
ahead, because it would no longer be safe for
Rocket’s Zapdos to power itself up while Active.
I mentioned another format earlier, Prop 15-3.
This restricted players to no more than 15 Trainer cards
in one’s deck and no more than three copies of any
non-basic Energy card. It was tried before
a rotating format (what we have now with Standard), and
while it changed things, it wasn’t enough (hence
Standard). I also don’t have any information on
how Rocket’s Zapdos performed in it; it would
have been one of the decks Prop 15-3 was intended to
bring under control (it ran a lot of Trainer cards) but
15 Trainers in a slower format was still conducive to
Haymaker, so the deck might have somehow managed
with such restrictions.
Ratings
Standard:
N/A
Expanded:
N/A
Limited:
5/5
Conclusion
Rocket’s Zapdos
was an amazing attacker, and with our focus on
Lightning-Types this week, I thought it a fitting pick
for our Throwback Thursday. This Pokémon had great
stats and two attacks that comboed magnificently well
together while also taking advantage of both familiar
and less used Trainer cards. It would be pretty
bad if reprinted, but might be good if “modernized”.
They actually did that once before, with Rocket’s
Zapdos-ex, though that card is only four years newer
than Rocket’s Zapdos itself.
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