Electropower #8- Top 11 Cards of Lost Thunder

aroramage

…huh. You’d think a free Choice Band to all Lightning Pokemon attacking your opponent would have ended up higher on the list.

Electropower is an Item card that lets your Lightning Pokemon do 30 more damage to your opponent’s Active Pokemon prior to Weakness/Resistance for the turn it’s used. I mean, that’s an automatic Choice Band that gets used! It has to be really good! And for Lightning decks, it is!

I suppose then all that needs to happen is to get a good Lightning deck going. I mean, we’re talking about “Lost Thunder” here, I’m pretty sure there are going to be some great Lightning Pokemon. There are some vulnerabilities like Item-lock or Garbodor that are present in the game that could see some form of counterplay to Electropower, if it gets big enough. But aside from that, there’s really no reason not to run it. It affects everything, it does it before Weakness/Resistance, you can run 4 of it and they stack – play it, you’ll like it.

Rating

Standard: 4/5 (anything running Lightning Pokemon ought to have Electropower)

Expanded: 4.5/5 (it’s kind of the new Strong Energy)

Limited: 4/5 (except without the Energy and with more of the OOMPH)

Arora Notealus: I’m actually worried Electropower would be too good, but at the same time, it’s entering into a format where Lightning has a disadvantage to the popular deck, Buzzwole-GX. That said, they can hit back against it very hard with the Item at hand, so unless you’re worried about getting donked, you should at least be running this.

Next Time: Speed through your deck with something like this!

Otaku

If you skipped the last few CotD’s, yeah we are doing a Top 11 instead of a Top 10 for reasons that will eventually become clear. If you are brand new and would like to understand how our usual Top 10 countdowns work, here is a link to a short article about it. Now, let’s get charged up because eighth place in our countdown goes to Electropower (SM – Lost Thunder 172/214, 232/214)! This Trainer-Item has a simple effect, though it only works for [L] Type Pokémon; the turn Electropower is played their attacks do 30 more damage to your opponent’s Active! The damage boost is only good if it was an attack that normally does damage in the first place, it applies before Weakness and Resistance, and multiple uses of Electropower in the same turn do stack, so you can get some very significant bonuses if you throw all your copies down at once! Though it usually goes without saying, other damage bonuses can also be piled on, such as from Choice Band and Professor Kukui. As long as they show up at the right moments, Eletropower could allow even smallish attacks to swing for impressive OHKO’s, and a single copy can shave a turn off the number required to score a KO.

Yeah, remember that extra damage can be worse than meaningless. You shouldn’t waste resources on overkill, especially when there are cards like the new Sigilyph-GX that can literally turn it around on you. Future support provides ways to recycle these cards specifically, which is good because the remaining options to do so after Puzzle of Time was banned are inefficient, pricey, or both. Even as a one-time-per-copy trick, though, Electropower is pretty nice. Times when another 10 to 30 damage would matter, even if you already need to run another such card that would also cover that spread, you can close the gap more reliably. Situations where the pre-existing options couldn’t close a larger gap, now there is at least a chance. We even have a new trick, Alolan Ninetales-GX, that  can easily fetch two copies of Electropower via its Ability, and Volkner can snag one copy plus a [L] Energy if you can afford to use your Supporter for the turn. It makes you wonder why this card didn’t score higher? Do we lack attackers to use it?

No. One of the great things about Electropower is how 30 damage is enough to still net an extra 10 after Resistance, while against Weakness it becomes +60 damage. You know another Type familiar with this kind of math? That’s right, [F] Types have been stacking damage bonuses for years now. The type so many [L] attackers are Weak to, and the Type featured in so many decks either as the main attacker, a co-attacker, or just some TecH to help counter Zoroark-GX. Yeah, this (and the greatness of some of our other picks) are why Electropower, a card that might have topped the list if it were in a lesser expansion, is number eight in SM – Lost Thunder. We have Tapu Koko-GX who isn’t [F] Weak. We just received Zeraora-GX, who is but is still a really great card and attacker. Soon we’ll get a pretty good Zapdos, and that is when I think we’ll really start to enjoy this card, give or take the brave (foolhardy?) souls who try to make it work ASAP. Expanded grants even more opportunities for Electropower usage, though it also comes with a lot of anti-Item effects as well. Still, the added combos almost certainly outweigh this. Electropower is great if you can pull any [L] attackers worth running – this set has quite a few – but is very disappointing if you don’t.

Ratings

• Standard: 3.5/5
• Expanded: 4/5
• Limited: 3.5/5

Electropower is a simple yet potent card that only works for a single Type, and that Type needs to be attacking for Electropower to matter.  It is too soon for official tournament results, and I haven’t tested Electropower myself, but the few I know who have been saying that it makes [L] decks worth it, even if [F] remains a strong presence in the metagame.  I’m not convinced, however, but that just means I think Electropower only needs to wait a little longer for its time to shock and shine.

Vince

Ready for some injection?

Even if you’re ready or not, it only works for Lightning Pokemon. For each use, it lets Lightning Pokemon deal 30 more damage to the Defending Pokemon. When factoring weakness, it acts like +60! For the demanding feat of using four Electropower, back with Dowsing Machine that lets you play one more, you get a total of 150 more damage that you can deal. If Puzzles weren’t banned, four of them would’ve made it a whopping 270 total damage boost!

This card will push Lightning attackers over the top, letting you achieve important numbers that your base attack would otherwise be short of. Although it helps all Lightning Pokemon, only a few of them will see competitive play because it laughs at 99% of puny, insignificant Pokémon that is outclassed. Some Lightning Pokemon that will see play frequently would be Tapu Koko Promo, Zeraora-GX, and even Dedenne-GX (still haven’t revealed the rest of the effect text). Even then, if you’re fed up of using/facing against the same Pokémon over and over, then you can always look at other Lightning Pokemon as long as it packs a punch.

This will see play in both Standard and Expanded for a select few decks because of how this card works. In Limited, this is a must run unless you didn’t pull any worthwhile Lightning Pokemon.

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

21times
PokeDeck
Central

Electropower (LOT 172) energizes Lightning types in the Pokemon Trading Card Game.  This Item card gives Lightning Pokemon a 30 damage spif to the opponent’s active Pokemon.

And there are so many Lightning types I want to try this out with now!  I’ve already played a couple of matches with Zeraora GX, and I want to try out the new Raikou (LOT 79) and Electivire (LOT 72) from Lost Thunder, and maybe I’ll even get Alolan Golem GX (CIN 34), Raichu GX (SLG 29), and Vikavolt GX (GRI 45) out of the binder again. 

And as Fighting types seem to have subsided a little bit, we can play Lightning archetypes now without fear of carrying weakness disadvantage every third or fourth match.  Unfortunately, Pokemon that are weak to Lightning are almost the rarest in the format: only Dark weak Pokemon were less encountered than Lightning weak (I faced Lightning weak Pokemon sixteen times last month but faced Dark weak Pokemon only twelve times).

Still, when you’re getting a plus thirty damage bonus from Electropower, that helps to offset the fact that you won’t have weakness advantage very often.

Rating

Standard: 3 out of 5

Conclusion

I only rated it so low because it only benefits a single type of Pokemon.  For Lightning archetypes, this is an automatic, no brainer four of.