Cinccino – Crimson Invasion – Pokemon Review

Vince

Cinccino has only one attack that can be played around pretty badly. It forces your opponent to accept that you are getting two cards from the discard into your hand, or deal 80 damage to the Defending Pokemon not named Necrozma-GX. The thing is, your opponent has an answer even if you did get your cards back; they will shuffle your hand by using N or Judge. It’s unreliable to the point where we would have to use a different approach to getting certain cards back and dealing consistent damage every turn.

Standard: 1/5     Expanded: 1/5     Limited: 1/5

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PokeDeck
Central

Cinccino (CIN 86) caught my eye partly because the first three letters of its name are the same as the abbreviation for the set it came out of, and partly because how many other Pokemon have three C’s in their name?  In all seriousness, I completely bypassed this card and gave it no attention whatsoever when it came out back in November.

MarquisEXB, however, did not.  If you’ve been to PDC, then you’ll have seen some of the crazy imaginative combinations he’s put together.   Cinccino Garbodor GRI is a pairing he came up with.  The idea is to string together a couple of Cinccinos, get your opponent to build up some damage in conjunction with Bursting Balloons, use energy denial to force your opponent to continue to use their resources, and then come in at the end and let Trashalanche blow everything up.

And it worked well in some of the games I played – I went 3 W 3 L in the six matches in which I spent revisiting it.  Unfortunately, there are too many decks today that want energy in the discard pile.  And Cinccino is weak to Fighting and way too easily obliterated by Buzzwole.  When your deck actually helps one of the major archetypes in the format (Squids) and is weak to the other (Buzz), 3 W 3 L actually seems like a pretty decent record, and I should probably get out now before I lose something like my next six matches with this Cinccino Garbodor combo.

Rating

Standard: 2 out of 5

Conclusion

It’s actually an interesting deck to play because it is so different.  Like the Looker Lock deck with Oranguru UPR and Raichu BUS, it’s worth playing this deck a couple of times just because it is so unusual and so different from the typical deck.  It will get your mind to work in other ways, look at the game from a different perspective, and that’s never a bad thing.