Damage Mover – Shining Legends – Pokemon COTD

Vince

Moving your own damage probably won’t advance your game plan, but there’s a lot you can do by moving three damage counters from one of your Pokémon to another of your Pokémon. You can even put it on Reshiram or Zekrom with Outrage, which does lots of damage depending on how much damage you’ve taken. You could easily fulfill the requirement of Drampa GX’s Berserk attack to do 150. You could even heal multiple Pokemon with Rough Seas.

Standard: 3/5
Expanded: 3/5
Limited: 4.5/5

aroramage

Ever wanted to put damage counters on one of your Pokemon, but you didn’t want to put allllllll the damage counters on your Pokemon? Introducing Damage Mover, which moves around damage at will the way you want to!

…sorta! It only moves 3 damage counters, and you can only do it from one Pokemon to another.

At first glance, this looks like a very gimmicky card. I mean, what’re you gonna do with this? Move damage around so your opponent doesn’t 2HKO a Pokemon? Even healing sounds better in that context, why even keep that damage on the field? But that’s something deceptively simple about Damage Mover. Yes, moving 3 damage counters around is a boring action in-and-of itself, but it’s not so much where you move the damage from as much as the Pokemon you move that damage to.

Take Drampa-GX, for example. His Berserk attack only goes off if your Benched Pokemon have damage counters. Note that it doesn’t say how they get those damage counters – you’d normally think of an attack dealing that damage, but now you can move it around instead with Damage Mover, thus “healing” Drampa-GX while also powering up Bersek to its full 150 damage! And that’s just one example in Standard – there are a few Pokemon that even benefit from having some damage on them!

I feel like there are a few decks that would actually run Damage Mover in them to take advantage of moving damage counters around. I know some Pokemon like to do things like double the damage they’ve got on themselves against the opposing Pokemon! So keep a handy eye out for Damage Mover and don’t get rid of it right away – it’s got some unexpected utility!

Rating

Standard: 2.5/5 (it’s not a card for every deck for sure)

Expanded: 2.5/5 (but it does have some good qualities to bring to certain Pokemon)

Limited: 3/5 (Mewtwo-GX is a good partner for this too – he can at least heal off the 30 damage from himself!)

Arora Notealus: Damage Mover is definitely one of those out there kind of cards. It doesn’t look like it’d be good at all, at first, but then you notice that it’s got some synergy with different cards, and then suddenly a new deck comes out of the woodwork. What a strange conundrum that must be.

Side Reviews: #5 Choice Band – the definitive Tool of the game right now, Choice Band made an enormous impact being a superior version of Muscle Band, just limited on hitting EX/GX instead of applying a flat damage buff against everything. It makes it not only a great Tool to have on-hand, but it also makes it a generally great option; unlike Muscle Band, which out of sheer utility you ran at 4, Choice Band is more flexible depending on the format being overrun by EX/GX or not, and that means it doesn’t need to have 4 spaces dedicated in every deck, and that makes it an incredible card to have in the format period.

#4 Gardevoir-GX – the deck-to-beat right now, Gardevoir-GX handles being a Stage 2 GX by offsetting itself with not only a great Ability but two 1-Energy cost attacks, one of which can deal out major damage for little investment while the other is a once-per-game mass recovery option. It should be no surprise that Infinite Force is the major highlight here, and while I personally am not a huge fan of the deck, there’s no denying that Gardevoir-GX has a potent position in the game and likely will remain that way for a little while. At least until the next powerful broken Pokemon card comes out.

#3 Zoroark-GX – speaking of powerful Pokemon-GX, Zoroark-GX is an even more surprising GX to unleaseh, as it’s got the same power trio set-up that Gardevoir-GX has, now on a Stage 1. His Trade Ability is generic draw power, and Riotous Beating is fairly powerful with enough Pokemon in play, but his GX Attack essentially duplicates an attack that Zoroark has had on his cards in the past. I don’t know if I’d have had him strictly higher than Gardevoir-GX because of this or the draw power, but he has definitely remained the biggest card to get out of Shining Legends.

Weekend Thoughts: What did you think of this week’s cards? Pick any favorites you might run in your next deck? Any new deck ideas come to mind? Do you think you could make something like Damage Mover work in one of your decks? Maybe there’s even a side review card that makes the most sense to use it on, or maybe one of the other cards from this week!

Otaku

Damage Mover (Shining Legends 58/73) may be the new textbook example of a niche or specialist card.  This Trainer-Item allows you to take three damage counters from one of your Pokémon and move them to one other of your Pokémon.  This is the same amount of damage that the rarely worthwhile but oft reprinted Potion heals, so why simply move it elsewhere?  For the combos, of course.  While there aren’t a lot of good cards with effects that change based on the amount of damage present on one or more of your Pokémon, sometimes if there is are any damage counters on them at all, there are at least a few.  I won’t be naming all of them, but I’ll cover a few I think are either effective or interesting.

• The quality beatstick Drampa-GX can do 150 for [CCC] if any of your Benched Pokémon have at least one damage counter on itself.  The main issue here is that decks focused on Drampa-GX seem to have already found better ways of achieving this with cards like Po Town, Rainbow Energy, orTeam Magma’s Secret Base.
• Taurous-GX (and several less currently successful attackers) have attacks that do an additional X damage per damage counter on themselves.  In the case of Tauros-GX, he has two such attacks: “Rage” for [CC] doing 20 plus 10 per damage counter on himself, and Mad Bull-GX which does 30 per damage counter on himself.  The main issue here is that it is usually more effective to include cards that increase HP, reduce damage taken, heal small amounts of damage, and/or change out a Pokémon.  Yes, that is a lot of alternate options, and there are even some more specialized examples that don’t work with Tauros-GX!  It can be simplified by saying you’re either tanking, going for the surprise hit, or both.  If Tauros-GX is already up front, you’re not going to have damage counters to move without yet another combo, while Tauros-GX in reserve is a natural combo for Ninja Boy.

So, even with such options, Damage Mover may not be the best.  If it said “up to 3 damage counters” and/or allowed you to move the counters to more than one target, it would be much better.  The greater control wouldn’t only help with the above examples, but with more finicky combos, where you might need to hit a very specific amount of damgae counters, or clear a threshold amount (and how often do you want to be more damaged than the minimum required?).  For now, Damage Mover is best in the Limited Format, save that it is hard to make use of Shining Legends there due to how the boosters were released.  There, it will serve as a healing card; technically it can do this in almost any Standard and Expanded deck, but it does it so poorly that you’d never run it just for that purpose.  This is still reflected in the scores for all three formats, however.

Ratings

Standard: 2/5

Expanded: 2/5

Limited: 3.5/5