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Pojo's Pokémon Card of the Day

21times	Seviper (Burning Shadows, 50/147) slithers into the meta from the Burning Shadows expansion set.  A 100 HP Basic Psychic Pokemon, Seviper’s main feature is its ability More Poison which entitles you to put an extra damage counter on your opponent’s poisoned Pokemon between turns.  Furthermore, this ability stacks, meaning if you have four Seviper on your bench, your opponent puts five damage counters on their poisoned Pokemon instead of one! I’m sure this is better in Expanded with Hypnotoxic Laser (Black & White – Plasma Storm, 123/135) and many of the other poison enhancing cards available in that arena, but it still can add up in Standard as well.  I came across a Toxapex GX (Guardians Rising, 57/145) Seviper deck last week that inspired me to give it a try (even though I beat it).  I didn’t have much success with it, going 5 W 5 L, but it’s still kind of fun to play, and it puts a huge amount of pressure on your opponent if you can get Super Intense Poision off.  With Seviper, it’s got to be a very scary thing for your opponent to be looking at 120, 130, or even 140 damage on their active Pokemon with that same stack of Poison counters ready to drop the same amount of damage coming out of their turn. Unfortunately, we have quite a few ways to get Pokemon in and out of the active (Guzma (Burning Shadows, 115/147), Acerola (Burning Shadows, 112/147), Super Scoop Up (Burning Shadows, 124/147), and there are a number of Pokemon that completely shut Super Intense Poison down (Magearna EX (Steam Siege, 75/114) and Comfey (Guardians Rising, 93/145), so Super Intense Poison usually doesn’t get to do damage coming out of your opponent’s turn.  And Toxapex GX is weak to Psychic, meaning Trashalanche needs only six items in the discard to one shot it. One other thing to note about this deck – I found that in several cases when a Toxapex GX would get KO’d, I would actually on occasion transfer the energy on it via Wishful Baton (Burning Shadows, 128/147) to a Seviper.  This frequently made it a seven prize card game.  I noticed that because you want to have as many Seviper down on the bench as possible, it’s often difficult to have more than one Toxapex GX on the bench, especially if you play a Tapu Lele GX (Guardians Rising, 60/145) early on.  I also found that with the Max Elixirs (Breakpoint, 102/122) and Wishful Batons, you usually have an overabundance of energy by the time you get to mid game.  It does no good to have six energy on a Toxapex GX, so you might as well put it on a Pokemon that will help strategically extend your game. Rating Standard: 2 out of 5 Conclusion Seviper is a very niche Pokemon, but it can make your poison based attackers a lot more lethal.  Taking ten damage coming in and out of turns is tolerable.  If you can get even three Seviper on the bench, the damage coming out of your opponent’s turn adds up much more significantly.  There were even a couple of times when Super Intense Poison put 130 damage on my opponent’s Pokemon, and he was unable to switch it out of the active, so it was KO’d coming into my next turn.  He would promote another Pokemon, and I would again put 130 damage and 13 poison counters on my opponent’s newly promoted Pokemon.  This combination of Toxapex GX and Seviper, when it can get all set up, can put pressure on your opponent like no other Pokemon in the game.
Vince	Over the course of this week and next week’s COTD, we will be reviewing two cards from the Burning Shadows expansion on Mondays and eight Ace Spec cards on the rest of the weekdays.  If you don’t know what an Ace Spec card is, it is a mechanic that existed between BW Boundaries Crossed until BW Plasma Blast.  Based on 13 cards, they’re all trainer-item cards.  These are item cards that are said to be very powerful that only one Ace Spec card is allowed per deck.  This means as soon as you designate your Ace Spec card of choice, you are barricaded from using 12 other Ace Sped cards, so choose wisely.  This mechanic can also affect card legality from much older cards such as Computer Search and Master Ball, but more on that later.  We decided to leave out Pokemon specific Ace Spec cards (there are five of them, two for Kyurem, one for Victini, and two for Genesect) and reviewing only eight Ace Spec cards that doesn’t care about what deck you’re playing.  All Ace Spec cards are Expanded and Legacy legal, and I may put Unlimited scores for Computer Search and Master Ball as well.  I may also score Standard even though it’s no longer legal, kind of a hypothetical score.   So onto today’s card, Seviper is about the combos presented on this card, and I think it has the potential to be good if such a combo can work on a competitive environment.  Its ability makes you put one more damage counter on Poisoned Pokemon between turns.  So that could mean that…   -Toxapex GX’s Super Intense Poison puts 11 damage counters instead of 10.   -Hypnotoxic laser and Virbank City Gym means 4 more damage counters instead of 3.   -Toxicroak’s Triple Poison would become Quadruple Poison!   This residual damage is useful for pressuring your opponent to actually do something to save the Pokemon.  Your opponent may evolve their poisoned Pokemon (although Sea of Emptiness from SM4 still keeps special conditions even after evolving), or retreat/switch from the active spot to the bench.   Overall, this is a pretty decent card that can be combined with other sources.  Without any combos involving Poison, Seviper would have to resort to its own attack, Venomous Fang, to poison the defending Pokemon, which costs PCC for 30 damage.  It can also do well in Limited, where not only Venomous Fang is the source of damage, but it’s ability also contribute on adding damage.  Be aware that you won’t be able to attack for two turns due to PCC and manual energy attachments.   Ratings:   Standard: 3/5 Expanded: 3/5 Limited: 3.5/5
Retro	So, it’s been a long while since we had a Seviper card. Which is frankly quite in tune with Seviper’s reputation in the Pokémon fan base; being a snake that doesn’t evolve and it is rather hard to get, it faces stiff competition as being a popular snake-based Pokemon from the likes of Arbok and especially Serperior, which has an even larger fan base. But can the Seviper from this expansion be good enough to make it memorable, as does Garbodor has done to the TCG community? Because Garbodor is pretty much similar to Seviper; it is hated by the mainstream community, and yet it has a love-hate relationship with the TCG player base.             What Seviper does here is that it brings to the metagame a new form and a potentially permanent damage over time tick damage increase to the Standard format as well as an extra source of said damage in the Expanded format. Seviper’s Ability, which is its main forte, is More Poison. For every Seviper you have in play at your side, you can deal 10 more damage to poison ticks between turns. So if you have 3 Seviper in play, you can deal 30 damage’s worth of poison between turns. If you have 4, that means you can deal 40 damage, and so on. It’s worth mentioning too, that Seviper also has a good helping of 100 HP and it’s a Basic Pokemon, so it can be searched quickly using methods like Nest Ball (SM Base Set) or Bridgette (XY BREAKthrough) to help populate your bench with these snakes. It also has an attack as well; Venomous Fang deals 30 damage for 1 Psychic and 2 Colorless energies and it poisons your target. This attack is seriously underpowered, but considering that Seviper is a support Pokemon that will most of the time will not attack and will not receive energy investments, so this attack will at the majority be left unused.             In the Standard format, stall decks utilizing poison as a win condition are quite uncommon in the metagame, but when you see one, rest assured that Seviper has found a home there. One such example is Toxapex-GX (SM Guardians Rising) that has the Super Intense Poison attack for 3 Psychic energies; this attack deals 100 damage worth of poison to its target. Combine this with at least 3 Sevipers in the bench, and you can hit 130 damage of poison between turns. Now you may wonder, why 130 damage is chosen as a bench damage count? Because if your opponent cannot retreat their poisoned Pokémon, they will take 260 damage total between your turn and your opponent’s turn, which is enough to one shot all Pokémon in existence (as poison cannot be removed in any way aside from retreat), and that is superb on its own! You also has Salazzle (SM Guardians Rising) that has the Hot Poison ability which burns and poisons your opponent when you evolve one from a Salandit. Having 3 Sevipers in the bench means that you can deal 50 damage total between turns (20 from the burn and 30 from the poison plus 3 Sevipers) which is phenomenal considering that you don’t need to attack to end your turn nor invest energies to deal the poison!             In the Expanded format, this is where things get more interesting; yes, I’m talking about the inclusion of Seviper in LaserBank strategies, which is all over the place. What I love about the combination of Hypnotoxic Laser (BW Plasma Storm) and Virbank City Gym (BW Plasma Storm) is that they can be used in any deck to help improve damage, and adding Seviper into the mix will just add the fun! The LaserBank combo itself deals 30 damage worth of poison damage alone, and having 3 Sevipers in the bench can deal a total of 60 damage by itself between turns, meaning coming into your turn when your poisoned target is still not retreating, you can deal 120 damage coming into your turn!  One of my favorite pairings for this is with the ever legendary Seismitoad-EX (XY Furious Fists) that is really combo independent because it just needs a DCE and it can Item lock for days. This combo is so good as all you need to start your win condition is just an active Seismitoad, a DCE, potentially damage boosting tools such as Muscle Band (XY Base Set) or Fighting Fury Belt (XY BREAKpoint), several Sevipers, the Virbank City Gym stadium and several Sevipers on your bench, and off you go!  It’s that simple.             However, there are several drawbacks that Seviper brings. First off, since its very passive, your opponent can just use it as Guzma (SM Burning Shadows) bait and leave it there, and combined with its hefty 2 retreat cost is punishing. It is also weak to Psychic, which is worrisome as Espeon-GX (SM Base Set) and Garbodor (SM Guardians Rising) isn’t going down the meta viability ladder anytime soon. Also poison as a win condition itself is rather fringe as a whole; most decks now often run the aforementioned Guzma (SM Burning Shadows) to remove the poison, free Retreat Pokémon such as Tapu Koko (SM30 Promo) that can just retreat back to remove the poison, or take over Pokémon such as Zoroark (XY BREAKthrough) or Keldeo-EX (BW Boundaries Crossed) to delete the poison altogether.              Overall, considering the meta now, Seviper is and can be considered a cringe card and a very meta call card that does excel in what it does, but the thing that it does best is also a bit unviable a strategy. Poor Seviper. Rating: Standard: 2/5 (Poison decks such as Toxapex-GX, Salazzle and Alolan Muk-GX are a bit low on the viability side, and being their support Pokémon, Seviper automatically met a similar fate.) Expanded: 3.5/5 (If you can find room in your LaserBank strategy, Seviper is a cool card that is easy to exploit with the popularity of poison as a whole in that meta.) Limited: 3.1/5 (Similar to Expanded, if you can find room, then Seviper is a cool addition to your deck. If you can find the poison deck pieces, that is.) Next on “SM Burning Shadows”: It’s not a new card. Not even it’s part of the SM set.