Double Gust + free retreat

Gust of Wind is a card used in almost every good Pokemon deck.  Double Gust is rarely used, because it also lets your opponent choose one of your benched Pokemon and make it active.  However, if you are using a deck in which all your cards have free retreat, then Double Gust is a much better card (95% of the time) than Gust of Wind.  The rest of this article will pertain to that situation, and assume you are playing a deck of Pokemon with only free retreat.

Some people play Sneasel decks which use only free retreat cards (Sneasel, Murkrow, Cleffa, Scyther, Gligar, etc.).  Sometimes there are "common only" tournaments held, and the deck I use has only free retreat cards.  In that deck, I use Double Gust instead of Gust of Wind.  (Even though the opponent also gets to gust one of my Pokemon, they all have free retreat, so I can still ultimately choose whatever Pokemon I wish to make active, without paying any retreat cost.)

The big advantage of Double Gust in a free retreat deck, is it can also be used to escape from status effects such as Sleep, Paralysis, Confusion (assuming your retreat attempt fails), which might ordinarly keep you from attacking during that turn.  So a Double Gust, in a free-retreat deck, will have the practical effect of being both a Gust of Wind and a Switch at the same time.  This can be a very big help for allowing you to continue to attack.

Of course, in a few situations a Double Gust will not work to your best advantage; you may end up helping your opponent more than yourself.  And if Rocket's Training Gym is in play, then allowing your opponent to Gust up one of your benched Pokemon would require you to pay a retreat cost in order to bring back your original active Pokemon.  So there is a small percentage of situations where a simple Gust of Wind would be better than a Double Gust, even in a free-retreat deck.

Overall, however, in a free-retreat deck a Double Gust is a much better card than a Gust of Wind because the Double Gust has double the potential use (Gust, Switch) compared to a Gust alone.

Pikabruce
pikabruce@asu.edu