Erika – Genetic Apex
Date Reviewed: February 18, 2025
Ratings Summary:
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is horrible. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Otaku
Today we’re looking at Erika (A1 219, 266)! She’s a Trainer-Supporter that has you select one of your injured Grass Pokémon, then heal 50 damage from it. If one of your (G) Pokémon has 10 to 40 damage on it, you can select it, in which case Erika heals all that damage. If none of your (G) Pokémon are injured, or you have zero (G) Pokémon in play, you cannot play Erika, even if you just wanted to thin your hand. Erika is available at the ♦♦ and ★★ rarities.
We’re up to 35 unique Trainer cards in the Pokémon TCG Pocket, including Erika. Pocket currently has four1 distinct classes of Trainer: Item, Item (Fossil)1, Supporter, and Tool. No current card effects support or counter Trainer cards as a group, but such effects do exist in the full TCG. We have 18 unique Supporters in Pocket already. You may only use one Supporter card during your turn2, so they compete with each other more for deck space than other cards do.
Card effects that “support” Supporters exist in the full TCG, but don’t (yet?) exist in Pocket. Counters for Supporters, on the other hand, debuted in Genetic Apex. Gengar (A1 122) and Psyduck (A1 057) have single-Energy attack that prevent the opposing player from using a Supporter during their next turn. Gengar ex (A1 123, 261, 277) has an Ability that prevents the opposing player from using Supporters while it is in play.
Erika is one of only two Supporters that provide Pokémon Type-specific support. She’s also one of only two Trainer-based healing effects, the other being Potion (P-A 001)3. Leaf (A1a 068, 082) and X Speed (P-A 002) suggest that a Supporter ought to be twice as effective as the equivalent Item card. Erika heals 2.5 times the damage of Potion, so either being restricted to only healing (G) Pokémon is only work healing an extra damage counter, or the devs decided healing more than 50 damage would be too potent.
I’m inclined to think the latter. I’ve already mentioned how much more useful Potion is in Pocket than it ever was in the full TCG. 50 damage doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s enough to erase all the damage from a light attack, halve the damage from a medium attack, etc. Early game, it might end up undoing multiple turns of low damage attacks, recoil from Rocky Helmet (A2 148), etc. We should also discuss the Grass Type as a whole, because it lends itself to Erika.
There are four cards that explicitly help [G] Pokémon and/or Energy: Caterpie (A1 005), Lilligant (A1 030), Serperior (A1a 006, 070), and Erika herself. Caterpie can use its “Find a Friend” attack for (C) to add a random (G) Pokémon from your deck to your hand. Lilligant can use her “Leaf Supply” attack for (G)(G) to do 50 damage, while also attaching a (G) Energy from your Energy Zone to one of your Benched (G) Pokémon. Serperior has the Ability “Jungle Totem”, which causes (G) Energy attached to your (G) Pokémon to provide (G)(G).
No other Type has this much explicit support, and all but Serperior have been around since the first set. I will admit that Erika is the only one that is currently seeing successful play, but at least it exists. While I don’t expect Caterpie or Lilligant to see a resurgence, Serperior could easily make a comeback. Why Serperior isn’t doing well is also important to Erika, because there are competitive Grass decks right now… it’s just the ones running Serperior fell below a 50% win rate.
At the time of this writing, the most played deck is a Grass Type. If we ignore the oddballs with fewer than 68 examples, this Grass deck has the second best record. So, what is it? Exeggutor ex (A1 023, 252) and Celebi ex (A1a 003, 075, 085)! Exeggutor ex has been competitive since it released, and even though it doesn’t especially benefit from Serperior’s Jungle Totem Ability, it was still often used in the deck. Celebi ex does especially benefit from Jungle Totem… but if your Active Exeggutor ex only needs one Energy, and is tanking hits thanks to Erika (and Potion), you can just load Celebi ex with Energy the old fashioned way.
We still have a little more to cover. I brought up other Grass support, but what about other healing cards? Erika is one of 18 unique healing cards, but most of them are Pokémon that can only heal themselves, through one of their attacks. One of those is Venusaur ex (A1 004, 251), a Stage 2 (G) Pokémon with the highest printed HP in the game right now (190), and it’s big attack for (G)(G)(C)(C) does 100 damage while healing itself by 30. It was never a major success, but it at least used to be competitive as a “healing tank” due to itself, Potion, and Erika.
Then there’s Butterfree (A1 007; P-A 013) and Shaymin (A2 022, 159). They each have an Ability that heals all Pokémon on your side of the field (including itself), once during your turn. Butterfree heals 20 but it’s a Stage 2. Shaymin only heals 10 but it’s a Basic. Both are handy not just for healing, but when you want to reduce the value of weak damage spread feeding into Cyrus. I don’t think Butterfree ever found much success, but Shaymin is at least seeing some in the present.
Tying this into Erika, Grass might be the best Type when it comes to healing. This could have backfired, and maybe it did for the healing I didn’t think was worth mentioning, and for Butterfree. If you’re not effective or efficient enough to be worth the effort, there are other Grass cards you can use. For Erika, and maybe Shaymin, it means you’ve got some bulkier Grass Types can try to pile on multiple forms of healing. There’s a special kind of hurt when you’ve almost KO’d an opponent’s Exeggutor ex, but then your opponent uses Erika and two Potion to erase 90 damage in one turn…
As we’re already running long, indulge me for a bit longer because we’ve got a card named “Erika” in the full TCG. There are actually several cards in the full TCG that have “Erika” in their name, but I’ll restrain myself and not elaborate on them further. Erika (G1 16/132, 101/132; CEC 191/236) is a Supporter that lets each player draw up to three cards, with the player who used Erika drawing first. I could see a card like this Erika becoming a staple if it released in Pocket… alongside Red Card (P-A 006).
That’s kind of what happened with the original release of Erika. Only the third release works the way I just described. It came out in 2019, and was not worth using. At all. It only served, intentionally or not, to errata the two older releases of the card, both from the year 2000. This was before the Supporter mechanic was introduced: Erika worked like an Item card! As we also had a predecessor to Red Card, they were deck staples until the first set rotation.
Rating: 3.5/5
While Erika is not a staple for Grass Decks, she’s close. If you’ve got a (G) Type attacker or meat shield, you should assume you’re running Erika until you have a good reason to not include her. It will happen. For example, the decks running Yanmega ex (A2 007, 180, 196) off Type don’t seem to include it. I’m actually scoring her higher now than when she first released; time has proven that the pacing of Pocket means healing 50 damage is often going to buy an extra turn of existence for the Pokémon in question.
1Item (Fossil) may not be a true, fourth category of Item. It appears as a search option you can select when viewing your collection, building a deck, etc. in the Pokémon TCG Pocket app.
2You cannot play any cards during your opponent’s turn.
3Some consider Giant Cape (A2 147) to count as healing, since it raises both current and maximum HP while attached.
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