Adventure Bag – Pokemon Lost Thunder Review

aroramage

There really isn’t a good reason to go out into the world without something to carry all your stuff in. I mean, have you tried holding everything in your arms all the time? Course that doesn’t explain the great hammer space these 10-year-olds seem to possess, but I digress…

Adventure Bag is an Item that lets you search and add 2 Tools from your deck to your hand. That’s always a handy thing to have – instant access to Choice Bands is nice, but I think that Silvally-GX loves having something to grab out all those Memory Tools they’ve got. You can also use this to grab the new Counter Gain out from your deck when you need it too! So there’s a lot of versatility in this card.

Ultimately, it depends on what deck you’re running though. If you don’t have that many Tools, you could justify Adventure Bag as a means to an end, but it doesn’t make sense to run 4 of them just to grab maybe 1-2 Tools. If you’ve got plenty of Tools though, it’s more than likely that you’ll want to pack an extra Adventure Bag to make sure you can grab a hold of them!

Rating

Standard: 3/5 (depends strongly on what deck to put it in)

Expanded: 3/5 (if you find the right deck though, this card can be wildly useful!)

Limited: 2.5/5 (while there are a few Tools here, most of them aren’t too great in a limited environment)

Arora Notealus: Seriously, you can fit Pokeballs of all sorts, a bunch of TMs, a ton of Berries, a device for calling people, fishing rods, a Bicycle or three – what can’t you put into this thing? I don’t remember being 10 and having a backpack for holding onto literally everything!

Next Time: For when being a ghost just isn’t enough!

Vince

Adventure Bag is the most essential thing to have in one’s entire Pokemon adventure, storing many kinds of items that sometimes doesn’t make sense, like putting a Bicycle on a bag (blatant example), or putting 999 of each kinds of items. Anyhow, for the TCG, it lets you fetch two Pokémon Tools. If you have decks that contains Pokémon Tools, then Adventure Bag will help you a lot. You can use it to get certain tools that you want to attach immediately, like Choice Band and Escape Board for Standard. Or, you can use those two tools as even more discard fodder for Roto Motor decks, which seems to become a somewhat competitive deck to enjoy using. I did play a couple games facing Roto Motor decks, and with a good setup, it can attack as early as the second turn of the game!

For Expanded, there’s even more Pokémon tools to fetch such as Muscle Band, Fighting Fury Belt, and Float Stone, so Adventure Bag will be used to great effect. It also helps fetch some of the Ace Spec Pokemon Tools that’s limited to one per deck. Even scarier is that a player can use Adventure Bag for two any tools AND attach it to Garbodor so that Garbotoxin shuts down Abilities. And even if they use a Field Blower to get rid of a tool, the second Tool will reattach to their Garbodor, forcing them to waste another Field Blower.

Overall, Adventure Bag helps you get certain cards without relying on draw based cards to hopefully get the cards that you want. Since for the most part you’re fetching Pokémon Tool cards and attaching them, your hand size will get small, small enough that cards that does this – “draw cards until you have X cards in your hand” – will have more value. Perhaps one drawback…okay, more like an aftermath is that it could increase the damage Trashalanche will do assuming you played an Adventure Bag and your opponent discarded two Pokémon tools. That’ll be a whooping 60 more damage!

Ratings:

Standard: 3.5/5 (Good card in general and making a certain deck improve)

Expanded: 4/5 (Another way to quickly get Garbotoxin into effect)

Limited: 3.5/5 (there’s Fairy Charms in this set, so I guess it serves a purpose.)

Notes: The artwork for the Adventure Bag seems like mostly female adventurers would use this. Based on this artwork, one can question even further how they would store every item that they’ll find.

Next up: A item that boosts the power of Ghost Type moves functions differently in the TCG.

21times
PokeDeck
Central

Adventure Bag (LOT 167) debuts in the Pokemon Trading Card Game from the Lost Thunder expansion set.  This Item card allows you to go get two Tool cards from your deck.

Obviously, the usefulness of this card is directly proportional to the quality of Tool cards we have available to us in the meta today:

• Bodybuilding Dumbbells
• Choice Band
• Choice Helmet
• Counter Gain
• Escape Board
• Exp. Share
• Metal Frying Pan
• Poison Barb
• Spell Tag
• Weakness Policy
• Wishful Baton

Choice Band, by far, is the most commonly employed Tool in the game today.  I actually never use this, however: I recently posted a stat that in November 55% of the decks I faced on PTCGO used non-GX Pokemon as their feature attacker.

I do use Wishful Baton quite a bit, and I love Spell Tag in the various Psychic decks I’ve carried it in. 

Metal Frying Pan is fantastic in Metal archetypes, and Escape Board has come in handy from time to time. 

Considering that this really is the era of Stage 1 decks, Bodybuilding Dumbbells can be very beneficial: there are some Stage 1’s with base 160 (or more!) HP, and Dumbbells can boost that up to 200!  For a single prize, non-GX Pokemon… CrAzY!

And there are Pokemon that can definitely benefit from this card: Genesect GX can attach two Tool cards to a single Genesect, and I think there’s a Pokemon coming out in the near future that does damage based on the number of Tool cards you have in play.

So is Adventure Bag worth it?  Maybe half the decks out there today are playing Field Blower, and most of those are only running a single copy.  But do any of these Tools really help elevate your deck to a superior status, will they really help you win more games?  If so, you might want to run out to your local PTCGO Trading platform and pick up a couple.  Adventure Bag will help you accelerate Tool attachment … but then the question becomes, what card do I remove to gain that benefit?  What card or cards do I sacrifice in the hope of getting my Tools out more quickly?

Rating

Standard: 2.5 out of 5

Conclusion

There’s no easy answer to this question, no mathematical formula to help solve this problem.  This is the area of theorymon that is all “I think and I feel.”  I will say, however, that if we get a couple more really good Tools, I’m sure you’ll see more Adventure Bags out on the streets.  Then the only question will be: who actually designs Adventure Bag,  Michael Kors or Coach? 

Otaku

Adventure Bag (SM – Lost Thunder 167/214, 228/214) is a Trainer-Item that lets you search your deck for up to two Pokémon Tools, add them to your hand, then shuffle your deck afterward. Not a lot of cards reference “Trainers”; most focus on a subclass or even a sub-subclass. Still, it is nice to know that means you don’t really have to worry about anti-Trainer effects and – in Expanded – you could benefit from Skyla or Trainers’ Mail. Many, many effects refer to Items, from the Ability of the recent Alolan Ninetales-GX (SM – Lost Thunder 132/214, 205/214, 225/214) to Item-punishing “Trashalanche” attack found on Garbodor (SM – Guardians Rising 51/145, 51a/145). There are other cards that affect Items in Standard, but those two are probably the most important, and Garbodor is nowhere near as relevant as it once was… but it’s rebounded before, so don’t forget about it. The Expanded Format also has a few Item-supporting effects but is best known for its potent anti-Item options, like the “Quaking Punch” attack of Seismitoad-EX or the “Forest’s Curse” Ability found on Trevenant (XY 55/146), usually in conjunction with Trevenant BREAK.

Getting to the actual effect, Adventure Bag is a two-for-one with restricted targets; on paper, seems like a solid enough deal, ensuring you not only get the exact Tool (out of those remaining in your deck) you need for a given situation but a bonus one on top of that. If you run a deck with many, many Tools, this makes it easier to have the correct one available at the right time. If a deck runs four copies of just one Tool, it can act like a “fifth copy”. The tiny bit of success we’ve can document so far is in certain Malamar (SM – Forbidden Light 51/131, SM – Black Star Promos SM117) where it appears to mostly fetch Escape Board (and sometimes Choice Band as well). There is a deck we don’t have yet, but which is doing well in Japan, based on an upcoming Zapdos card. The short version is that the deck needs both Choice Band and Escape Rope, even both in the same turn. While we have no track record proving it is actually a good use if any of the decks built around the many Pokémon capable of attaching multiple Tools at the same time prove viable, Adventure Bag may be valuable to them. Even Tools that normally don’t do you much good to drop into play as multiples, such as Choice Band, have a chance at comboing with each other attached to such a Pokémon (if the Pokémon in question is meant to attack).

Finally, Adventure Bag might be worth using in a deck that needs Tools but also to be able to “burn” a card (use it for almost no effect save shrinking your hand by one).  Granbull (SM – Lost Thunder 138/214) usually runs both Choice Band or Bodybuilding Dumbbells and also sometimes needs to use up cards just to clear out its hand but… what do you drop to make room for it?  The deck can’t really do with fewer copies of its Tools, even if it wants to add a search card for them. Which is currently a problem shared by most decks; there’s nothing to cut to make room for an otherwise useful Adventure Bag.  There are still some specific examples, though, keeping the card relevant to the Standard Format.  It’d be more handy for Expanded due to added combo opportunities, except I already mentioned the very potent anti-Item effects. In both Standard and Expanded, don’t forget that the potent anti-Tool effects also matter.  Always run Adventure Bag in the Limited Format; if you somehow can’t pull or make use of the many, many Tools in this expansion, Adventure Bag still lets you look at and shuffle your deck.

Ratings

• Standard: 3/5
• Expanded: 3/5
• Limited: 4/5