Dark City – Unified Minds Pokemon Review

Vince

Time to look at cards which had potential but missed being in the top 11! Dark City seems to be a pretty useful card because it makes Basic Dark Pokémon have no retreat cost. But because it helps only Basic Dark Pokémon, it doesn’t benefit other dark types who are Stage 1, Stage 2, Mega Evolutions, and even Break Evolutions. For Standard, this Stadium could benefit Greninja & Zoroark GX and Umbreon & Darkrai-GX as they can retreat for free from this Stadium. Expanded faces even more competition against Dark City as there are other methods to retreat for free………well a few. Darkrai-EX’s Dark Cloak ability lets you retreat for free if any Pokémon has any Dark Energies attached to it. Float Stone also zeroes out the retreat cost of the Pokémon with the tool. And other Dark specific support can come with Reverse Valley and Devoured Field for the damage boost from Dark types, which may clash with Dark City due to being Stadium cards.

Ratings:

• Standard: 3/5
• Expanded: 1.5/5
• Limited: 3/5

Otaku

Dark City (SM – Unified Minds 193/236) is a new Trainer-Stadium that zeroes out the Retreat Cost of all Basic [D] Pokémon in play. Seems fairly straightforward; if your deck features at least some prominent Basic [D] Types you can give them that perfect free Retreat Cost. Keep any Basic [D] Type from being stranded in the Active position, regardless of its Energy available to retreat, even if something else is boosting its Retreat Cost, as effects that set a score to a certain amount overwrite those that merely add or subtract from it.   If you’re dealing with primarily Evolved [D] Types or Basics of any other Types, it is only useful for countering other Stadium cards… which is reason enough to run it into the Limited Format, but not in Constructed Formats.

When it comes to actual, competitive decks, Dark City is showing up in Standard Format Black Box decks… or Dark Box, if you prefer. It isn’t the only Stadium in those decks, though. It seems to be only a one-of in the Black Box decks we saw qualify for Day 2 of the World Championships. I expected more, but it seems other Stadium cards like Viridian Forest or even Ultra Space (for Naganadel). The Expanded Format has many other Stadium cards to consider and can use Darkrai-EX (BW – Dark Explorers 63/108, 107/108; BW – Black Star Promos BW46; BW – Legendary Treasures 88/113) so that anything you have with a [D] Energy attached can retreat for free. There may be some niche where neither another Stadium nor Darkrai-EX works for the deck, I suppose.

Ratings

• Standard: 3/5
• Expanded: 1.5/5
• Limited: 3/5