aroramage |
And now we come back to another
week with one of the most...interesting Pokemon designs,
Tsareena. An entirely female evolutionary line that has
some...boots.
...interesting.
So Tsareena migrates into the TCG
with an attack and an Ability. Trop Kick is a 3-for-80
that...also does Big Malasada on Tsareena? Wow, and
we've completely invalidated the need for that Item,
thus freeing up 4 spaces in your Tsareena-based deck!
Might I recommend a Rare Candy or two? All kidding
aside, Tsareena's Trop Kick doesn't really replace Big
Malasada - it COMPLETELY OUTDOES IT!! Not only do you
heal 20 damage, you also get to remove ALL Special
Conditions (reminder that Big Malasada only removes 1)
AND you get to deal 80 damage. All that in this one
attack? Not too bad! It's a shame the damage output
isn't somewhat higher, but it makes her viable at the
least.
Which leads me into her Ability,
Queenly Majesty. In the games, it's a unique Ability to
the Tsareena family that nullifies priority attacks.
Since there's no such thing as priority attacking in the
TCG, the Ability is reworked to the next best thing:
taking a look at your opponent's hand and discarding a
card from it. Course you can only do this when you
evolve into Tsareena, but there is potential to be
really mean and loop her with Forest of Giant Plants and
Devolution Spray to discard your opponent's entire
hand!!
...wait, it's only one per turn?
Oh...never mind then.
Still the Ability is useful as it
gives you information on your opponent's deck and can be
used to get rid of a useful card in their hand, like a
Sycamore or Kukui they've got. Combined with other hand
reduction cards, this could be a potentially devastating
deck to work with, but the major drawback that comes to
mind is that Tsareena is still a Stage 2, meaning you'd
have to run the Basic and the Stage 1 to efficiently
take advantage of Forest of Giant Plants to use her
Ability. Don't get me wrong, her attack is pretty good,
but I dunno if it's the kind of attack to center your
deck around.
Who knows what potential she'll
hold for the future though?
Rating
Standard: 3/5 (being a Grass-type
is great, and a free discard is really nice too)
Expanded: 3/5 (it's just a great
time to be around in this format)
Limited: 4/5 (though it probably
won't last forever)
Arora Notealus:...Tsareena...is
such an interesting Pokemon. Like how do they take the
concept of the snoody high-end rich person and personify
that onto a plant? Pokemon just never ceases to amaze.
Course she's also part of the crowd of Gen VII Pokemon
that got TOTALLY UNIQUE ABILITIES to themselves, which
that's amazing in its own right. Like they thought of
the Ability first and then made the Pokemon around
that.
Next Time: When you've got too many
Pokemon to deal with, what you need is some of this!
|
Otaku |
Another week,
another review! Unfortunately, in this case,
another late review, which is more the pity
because it steps on my opening joke of “Go Killer
Queen!” as a not-so-subtle reference to Jojo’s
Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable. It
is probably better this way. Since the character’s
name in that story is a reference to the song by the
band Queen and I think I’ve just earned a
Confusion check for myself with this introduction.
Speaking of confusion, while researching today’s card, I
found out that there is some over how it works,
seemingly due to the combination of a slightly off
translation, some Pokémon reference websites still using
said translation for their text spoilers (instead of
referencing the actual, English card), and some
confusion over a pretty typical phrase for Pokémon
Abilities… that is admittedly a poor choice on TPCi’s
part as a straightforward reading of the text runs
contrary to how it works in the game. Oh, my!
So without further ado, onto the review of Tsareena
(Sun & Moon 20/149)!
Tsareena
is a Grass Type, allowing her to exploit the Weakness
found on many Water Pokémon and a decent chunk of the
Fighting Type, and nothing in Expanded or Standard is
Grass Resistant; a solid performance overall. There are
some anti-Grass Type effects, but outside of Parallel
City, you won’t encounter much, and it just means
-20 damage if the opponent doesn’t mind capping
his or her Bench at three Pokémon. The Grass Type
has two standout pieces of support. Forest of Giant
Plants provides amazing Evolution acceleration, but
actually only cares about Steenee being a Grass
Type. Revitalizer allows you to add two Grass
Type Pokémon from the discard pile to hand, which is
good for Standard play and great for Expanded, where you
have Battle Compressor. I don’t recall any
[G] Energy-based effects which are likely to help
Tsareena; there are a few but they don’t seem
particularly relevant to this card. The natural
synergy from running on [G] Energy and/or sharing Grass
Pokémon Type based support may come into play. Be
prepared for Tsareena to struggle if you cannot
open with (and maybe keep) Forest of Giant Plants
on the field, and even with she’s still a three card
investment. Tsareena has 140 HP, just barely at
the point where it becomes more likely to survive a
typical attack mid and late game than not. Fire
Weakness means a OHKO is all but assured by competitive
Fire Type attackers, barring the usual bad setup that
may plague any deck. Lack of Resistance is
typical; while it would have helped, no sense holding
this against Tsareena. Her Retreat Cost of
[CC] isn’t low enough to be good, but at least it isn’t
so high as to be crippling, either.
Tsareena
has one Ability and one attack. “Queenly Majesty” is
the Ability, which triggers when you Evolve one of your
in play Pokémon into her, during your turn. When
this happens, you may force your opponent to reveal his
or her hand, then discard a card of your choice from it.
Just seeing your opponent’s hand is a small treat, but
the targeted discard is quite, quite potent. Even
before building in combos, your opponent has to have a
very good or very bad hand for Queenly Majesty not to
generate some solid advantage. It is also where
there is confusion about Tsareena; this Ability
can be used as often as you can trigger it whether
through Evolving into multiple Tsareena or using
something like Devolution Spray to devolve
Tsareena, then re-Evolving. The latter could
be a ready-to-Evolve Bounsweet or Steenee
or the same Steenee if you have Forest
of Giant Plants in play. The only restrictions
are that you must Evolve into this Tsareena
from hand and during your own turn. If
you use something like Evo Soda or Wally,
it won’t work as those Evolutions count as coming from
your deck and not your hand. I cannot think of any
examples of Evolving between turns or during your
opponent’s turn, but if they exist, they won’t trigger
Queenly Majesty either. From what I can tell,
there are some that think this effect cannot be used
multiple times in a single turn due to minor error from
one of the more popular translations of the Japanese
version of the card (prior to the release of it in other
languages), the fear that this effect is better than it
looks, and the disbelief that an effect which would
indeed be broken in other TCGs could be used
multiple times per turn, even in Pokémon.
The weird thing?
The attack is going to need some explanation as
well, but not because of ruling or translation issues.
“Trop Kick” is an awesome name, and like Queenly
Majesty, is from the video games, though with a much
different effect. For [GCC], Trop Kick does 80
damage while also healing 20 damage from Tsareena
plus removing all Special Conditions. 80 damage
a pop means even your typical 170 HP Basic Pokémon-EX
survive three turns unless Weakness or other damage
buffs are a factor. Some of the biggest Pokémon
can survive three hits from Trop Kick. This
is definitely below the competitive curve; there are
exceptions, but they require less Energy, are on Stages
that require less setup, and/or include something else
to offset the low yield like useful Ability or attack
effect. While we may have such an Ability in
Queenly Majesty, we also have an attack effect, but it
doesn’t contribute as much as it may appear. Like
damage buffs, healing only matters if it shifts the
number of turns until your Pokémon is KO’d in your
favor, or if there is some effect dependent upon having
a specific amount of HP or damage. An attack that
scores a OHKO still scores a OHKO, so no luck
there. Things aren’t much better when it comes to
2HKO’s, as it only will delay things a turn if the
combination of two attacks (and any other effects) would
have resulted in an effective 140 or 150 damage; less
and it wouldn’t have been a 2HKO anyway, while more and
it is still a 2HKO (or OHKO). That’s most
of the competitive metagame, and we haven’t gotten to
the other misleading bit.
Trop Kick cannot
actually remove Paralysis or Sleep; those prevent you
from attacking, so an attack that heals them is for show
only, barring some future hypothetical card.
Confusion forces a coin flip, with “heads” having Trop
Kick work as intended (and removing Confusion), while
“tails” means it places three damage counters on
Tsareena instead of its intended effects. That
means Trop Kick only reliably treats Burn and Poison,
and even there, we have some timing issues.
Usually, it is your opponent afflicting your Pokémon
with Special Conditions, including Burn and Poison, so
you’ll have already taken damage from them (and possibly
had Burn go away on its own) before you have a chance to
attack with Trop Kick. There are also things like
Poison Barb, which Poisons you on your turn,
but after you attack. The way things
resolve, Trop Kick will resolve completely before
Poison Barb Poisons Tsareena, so you’ll take
Poison damage twice before Trop Kick could heal
it. There is also how Special Conditions can be
removed through a few others methods. Of
particular note here is through Evolving and Devolving;
if Tsareena doesn’t so much damage on herself so
as to be KO’d from reverting to Steenee, one of
the tricks for spamming her Ability will also shake
Special Conditions and many attack effects. It
isn’t all bad for Trop Kick; when we get Choice Band,
it will still be behind other competitive attackers in
terms of damage output, but it will be a bit easier to
reach key KO amounts. Queenly Majesty does
have some synergy with Trop Kick; the disruption may
slow down your opponent’s damage output, allowing the
healing to make a difference, and keeping the cycle
going by allowing you a chance to safely reuse Queenly
Majesty via stuff like Devolution Spray. I
just wouldn’t count on it.
So how to use
Tsareena? We need to look at from that which
she Evolves. The only options we have for
the lower Stages are Bounsweet (Sun & Moon
18/149) and Steenee (Sun & Moon 19/149).
You could skip Steenee and use Rare Candy,
but remember that won’t work with the effect of
Forest of Giant Plants. Both are Grass Type
Pokémon with Fire Weakness and no Resistance (like
Tsareena), as well as no Ability and two attacks (unlike
Tsareena). Bounsweet a Basic Pokémon with
60 HP, can heal 30 damage from one of your Pokémon for
[G] via its “Sweet Scent” attack, or for [C] can do 10
damage through “Splash”. Steenee is a Stage 1
Pokémon with 90 HP that also has Sweet Scent (same cost
and effect), but has “Stomp” for [CC] to do 20 damage
and flip a coin; “heads” means another 20 damage while
“tails” means just the base 20 is done. These are
not particularly great, but I will give a smidgen
of credit in that HP scores; though still well below
what they need to be, for what a Basic and Stage 1
typically possess they aren’t as low as they could be.
How can one go
about optimizing the usage of Tsareena?
First, by not forgetting the usual rules of deckbuilding;
we want something as reliable as possible given the
circumstances. I’m not going to worry too much
about the specifics of that; just remember that a big
issue for why we cannot make use of every strategy (let
alone card) I am about to suggest is because we’ll still
need room for Tsareena, whether we go all-out
with a full 4-4-4 line or slip a 1-0-1 line into a deck
that already runs spare Rare Candy (...that used
to be a real common thing, long ago). So assuming
we can build a deck utilizing Tsareena that is
sufficiently fast and reliable, how else can we
capitalize on her effects? I am going to start
with her attack, Trop Kick. Max Elixir and a
Double Colorless Energy can ready Trop Kick in a
single turn if you also use Forest of Giant
Plants to immediately Evolve. If other
attackers in the deck lend to this, I see no problem
with the strategy, but I don’t believe the return
is worth it for a deck that will likely be running quite
low on space. The same goes for most other
compatible Energy acceleration; it needs to complement
something else, barring some new release that
significantly alters the situation. Which makes it
clear that you really want a different primary attacker,
with Trop Kick held in reserve (or not used at all).
Queenly Majesty is
the reason to run this card and to optimize it we should
look for effects that complement it. Other effects
that attack your opponent’s hand seem like a good start.
Using Judge or Red Card before you Evolve
means your opponent has a smaller hand, and so every
remaining card most likely matters that much more.
On the other hand, using Queenly Majesty before
another discard effect will further shrink the
opponent’s hand, while also informing you of whether the
follow-up effect is worth it. Supporters like
Delinquent, Ghetsis, and Team Skull Grunt
can really wreck an opponent’s hand, but not only
do you have the usual burden of justifying your use of a
Supporter for the turn, but all three have other issues
that Queenly Majesty may help counteract. Delinquent
means discarding the Stadium card in play, and
especially if it is your own, that may not be worth it
for your opponent to discard the three cards they’d have
trashed anyway with a Professor Sycamore the next
turn. Ghetsis and Team Skull Grunt only
affect specific targets; if those targets aren’t in your
opponent’s hand, all you get is an even worse version of
Hand Scope. You may wish to consider other
effects to make the discard hurt worse; Alolan Muk
or Silent Lab can keep cards like Oranguru
and Shaymin-EX (XY: Roaring Skies 77/108,
106/108) from refilling your opponent’s hand.
Ideally (if we disregard potential game balance), we’d
have some means of controlling what your opponent
topdecks, but the only option that springs to mind is
Trick Shovel, a finite resource with finite reach
(still worth considering for Expanded play).
It badly hurts most
Item based combos, but Vileplume (XY: Ancient
Origins 3/98) means all your opponent’s Items are
also dead in hand, so you just need to focus on
discarding the best of the rest. While
Vileplume is also a Stage 2, both are Grass Types
and thus may share worthwhile support. By this
same logic, Ariados (XY: Ancient Origins
6/98) is also worth considering; this time because it
can offset some (but not all) of the damage deficit from
Trop Kick, by Poisoning all non-Grass Type Active
Pokémon via its Ability. Expanded offers AZ,
Cassius, Scoop Up Cyclone, and Super
Scoop Up as additional or alternate ways of reusing
Queenly Majesty; all will work a lot better if you have
Forest of Giant Plants in play but don’t
technically require it. Other than AZ, I’d
only include the rest if they work well with another
aspect of your deck, such as if you have a worthwhile
main attacker to bounce. Seismitoad-EX can also
provide Item lock, and while its damage output isn’t
great, it won’t need to hit hard if your opponent can
hardly ever fight back. Lurantis-GX is back on
the Grass train, and if you did have to attack with
Tsareena, it does make powering up Trop Kick a
simpler affair. It may behoove you to try
hit-and-run tactics; while Tsareena isn’t large,
she isn’t small, either. This means something like
Donphan (BW: Plasma Storm 72/135) could
toss it up front while hiding (and building) itself upon
the Bench. At least with this particular
Expanded-only example, you could use AZ to bounce
the entire Tsareena line when she survives, and
the various bits of Pokémon recycling if she doesn’t.
Speaking of which, at times shrinking your Bench such as
with Parallel City may be to your advantage,
especially if Forest of Giant Plants and
Revitalizer are handy.
While writing this,
I started to wonder if I ought to try Tsareena
behind something like Houndoom-EX and its mill
tactics, as mill also compliments hand control. So
as you can see, there is a lot that can work with
Tsareena, even more so in Expanded play, but
which bits to use and in what amounts is hard to answer.
I think Tsareena has much potential, but also a
lot of hangups. The net result is, for Standard
and Expanded, a somewhat average performance. For
Limited play, she’s pretty good. Her HP will last
longer, her lower Stages are a bit less useless, and
Trop Kick will face lower HP foes while the lower
average damage output gives its healing a better chance
of making a difference. You won’t be able to spam
Queenly Majesty, and there is a better chance your
opponent will have a hand with nothing important to
discard, but seeing your opponent’s hand matters more in
Limited play, and it is harder to recover when something
good is discarded.
Ratings
Standard:
3/5
Expanded:
3/5
Limited:
3.5/5
Summary
Such a scary and
(to my surprise) confusing card as Tsareena, and
in the end I only score her as if she were average.
That is because the good just about equals the bad;
messing with your opponent’s hand is powerful, but it
has been a while since Pokémon gave all the tools
necessary for this kind of effect to be blatantly
broken.
Tsareena
didn’t make any of our Top 10 lists, but I did panic
when I first saw her… which wasn’t when I first graded
her. By then, I remembered this wasn’t the
Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG when Yata-Lock decks ruled thanks to
the combos required to wipe out an opponent’s entire
hand and field in a single turn, then stop them from
drawing ever again. So Tsareena received a
“C” both times I graded her, which does indeed translate
to a three-out-of-five. With all that said, keep
an eye on her in case we do get the needed pieces
for devastating decks (or had them and just needed time
to put it all together).
|
