Crossceiver – Fusion Strike
Date Reviewed: November 26, 2021
Ratings Summary:
Standard: 3.00
Expanded: 1.00
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is horrible. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Otaku
2nd-place goes to… Crossceiver (SW – Fusion Strike 231/264). This Trainer-Item is an odd one. For starters, it is a Fusion Strike card, gaining access to their support. The big thing is that, to use it, you must play two copies from your hand at the same time. The good news is that is part of the effect (you normally can’t do such a thing). The bad news is that means even maxing out on Crossceiver will only give you two total uses… less if any copies are Prized or prematurely discarded by other card effects. Okay, so what could be worth all of this hassle?
Playing two copies of Crossceiver at the same time lets you add either a Pokémon or a Supporter into your hand!
That’s right, Crossceiver is a half-strength VS Seeker plus a decent bonus effect. Is it as good as VS Seeker? Absolutely not. Is it still good? I think so, but what do the deck lists say? That I was wrong! I went to good ol’ Limitless and checked their listings for decks. Unfortunately, as we’re dealing with tournaments that aren’t part of the Championship series, they don’t list the top cut in a manner where I can just Ctrl+F to see what decks ran the card. Well, maybe they do but I’m not seeing it. So I manually looked through the top five results for the top five archetypes and none were using Crossceiver.
Maybe some of the less successful archetypes can make good use of Crossceiver, but I am starting to think I was being unrealistic about the difficulty of playing two copies of an Item at once. Well, sort of. Past such cards have worked well, but they usually have two effects, one for when you play two copies at once and another when you play just one copy at a time. That isn’t an option here. Even more devastating, there’s another Trainer like this, and I did see it in at least a few competitive deck lists. Okay, so that’s Standard, how about Expanded? Unless they band VS Seeker, it’s a one-out-of-five. Even if you need to recycle something more than four times, it just doesn’t seem worth it for Crossceiver. If VS Seeker ever gets banned, maybe that will change.
Crossceiver was my 2nd-Place pick, and on paper it looks great! I am just thinking that, in practice, it is too much effort for a card pool that lacks some of the powerful Supporters of the past that made VS Seeker so good in past Standard Formats, and keep it great in Expanded. Still, feel free to try Crossceiver for yourself and prove me right wrong no matter once, since I’m flip-flopping. In Standard, I’ll score Crossceiver with a hopeful three-out-of-five.
Ratings
- Standard: 3/5
- Expanded: 1/5
20211126: Edited the review to include mention of Crossceiver as a Fusion Strike card.
Vince
Editor’s Note: Vince had this as his 3rd-Place pick.
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