Mewtwo V-Union #162 – Pokemon Card of the Day

Pojo

November 6, 2021

906

Mewtwo V-Union

Date Reviewed:
November 6, 2021

Ratings Summary:
Standard: See Below
Expanded: See Below

Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is horrible. 3 is average. 5 is great.

Reviews Below:

Otaku

At last, the final Mewtwo V-Union card, Mewtwo V-Union (SW – Black Star Promos SWSH162). If you’ve read all the past reviews, you can skip down to where I say “Enough with the recap!”, which will be in bold text. For the totally uninitiated, I strongly recommend you check out this article from the official Pokémon site. It does a great job at explaining this new mechanic, including some rulings going differently than I expected. Everyone else can read just keep reading. A Pokémon V-Union is made from four separate cards that – on their own – are incomplete Pokémon and unable to exist in play. In this case, we’re dealing with Mewtwo V-Union which is made from

You need all four pieces in order to put it into play. As explained in the Rule Box on each piece, you need all four cards in you discard pile (not your hand!), during your turn, with an open space on your Bench. Then you can combine them and play them to your Bench as a single, oversized Pokémon card (still takes up only one space on your Bench). All four pieces share the same name, so you may only have a total of four in your deck. If you really want to, you can run more of one piece and less of another, but you’ll just end up with dead cards in your hand or deck. If even one piece is in your Prizes, the rest are dead until you can dig it out. In Expanded, if one piece is sent to the Lost Zone, you’re just out of luck! Also, keep in mind that a specific Pokémon V-Union may only be put into play this way once per game. If you’re running multiple different Pokémon V-Union in the same deck, you cannot mix and match the pieces, but each completed Pokémon V-Union can be put into play once per game.

As a Psychic type, Mewtwo V-Union will enjoy exploiting the [P] Weakness found on many Fighting types, and most pre-Sword & Shield Psychic types (in Expanded). It will also have to deal with a decent amount of Psychic Resistance in Expanded as well. The available Psychic type support in Standard will vary from what I suspect is essential (Shadow Rider Calyrex VMAX) to what can only help indirectly (Fog Crystal). Expanded is a bit more promising, thanks to cards like Malamar (SM – Forbidden Light 51/131; SM – Black Star Promos SM117; Shiny Vault SV18/SV94), Max Potion, and Dimension Valley. Not that those first two are restrict to Psychic types, but I want to stress right now that Mewtwo V-Union probably needs healing and/or Energy acceleration. If Battle Compressor wasn’t an obvious way to get its pieces into your discard pile, Mysterious Treasure would be good as well.

Mewtwo V-Union’s Stage of Evolution is… V-Union! Yeah, like with Pokémon VMAX, for better and worse, the name of the new mechanic is also the name of the Stage of Evolution. I haven’t seen any card effect specify V-Union outside of the actual Rule Box on V-Union cards, explaining how to put them into play and how many Prizes they’re worth when KO’d. V-Union is neither a Basic nor an Evolution/Evolved Pokémon! So Mewtwo V-Union cannot be searched out from your deck by Fog Crystal, Quick Ball, Evolution Incense, etc. You can use something like Computer Search (fetches any one card), Ultra Ball (searches out any Pokémon), or Mysterious Treasure (searches out any Psychic Pokémon). Though – again – you’ll probably just be using Battle Compressor in Expanded, where I pulled those examples from.

Pokémon V-Union are worth three Prizes when KO’d. Yes, just like Pokémon VMAX. So they really need to be good to be worth the hassle of running them. It does help that they can hit the field on a player’s first turn, but needing four specific cards in your discard pile, and being unable to “summon” the same one twice are huge hits to reliability. Now, most of what I’ve already covered is printed on each card. So the game recognizes that each piece is named Mewtwo V-Union, is a Psychic type, has the Stage “V-Union”, and has a Rule Box. Note, there are two Rule Boxes, but only the one telling you how to put Mewtwo V-Union into play is printed on each piece. Everything else is not recognized by the game when a Pokémon V-Union piece is not in play. No V-Union has a Retreat Cost of [CCC] but if they did, you still couldn’t grab one from your deck with Heavy Ball. The total lack of a particular stat shouldn’t be confused as having that stat at “zero”, either; no using Level Ball for the cards without HP scores printed on them.

Mewtwo V-Union has 310 HP, which is printed on SW – Black Star Promos SWSH160. This would be small for a Pokémon VMAX, but even small Pokémon VMAX are tricky to OHKO outside of Weakness. From SW – Black Star Promos SWSH161, we know that Mewtwo V-Union is [D] Weak. Even exploiting that Weakness, an attacker needs to do 160 damage to one-shot Mewtwo V-Union. Fighting types, conversely, need to do 340 damage to take down Mewtwo V-Union in one attack, as Mewtwo V-Union is Fighting Resistant! While this is normally just a nice perk, attackeres such as Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX may make this quite relevant.

The other three Mewtwo V-Union cards each have one attack. “Union Gain” is common is found on the first piece of each different V-Union. Priced at [C], it lets you attach two basic Energy of that Pokémon’s type to itself. Not particularly good, as you’re giving your opponent a “free” turn to attack, but it still could come in handy from time to time. “Super Regeneration” is found on the second piece of Mewtwo V-Union, this time costing [PPC]. It lets you heal 200 damage from Mewtwo V-Union. Main attackers often hit at or harder than this. As such, it is like Union Gain; handy in certain situations, but probably not something to rely upon. I suppose both attacks could be good in a stall/control deck; if your opponent can only rarely attack you for damage, you can spare time building Energy and/or healing with your own attacks.

Yesterday’s piece had the attack “Psysplosion”. Also requiring [PPC] to use, it lets you place a total of 16 damage counters on your opponent’s Pokémon, as you like. Underwhelming but still functional against your opponent’s Active, as 160-for-three is decent, its real value is probably taking out smaller and/or wounded Pokémon on your opponent’s Bench. Being a heavy hitting in a damage spread deck is also a reasonable option, especially if the metagame gets enough effects designed around you having more Prizes remaining than your opponent. You can seem like you’re losing based on the Prize count when – including other turns of setting up – you’re one attack away from taking all six of your Prizes.

Enough with the recap! Besides giving us the second half of the Rule Box that states this Pokémon is worth three Prizes when KO’d, we get the card’s Retreat Cost, an Ability, and one final attack. Mewtwo V-Union requires [CC] to retreat. Lower is usually an advantage, higher is normally a drawback, so this is pretty much a neutral trait. Its Ability is “Photon Barrier” and it prevents the effects of your opponent’s attacks from doing anything to Mewtwo V-Union. Attack effects can vary from almost meaningless to defining a particular match-up. Damage does not count as an effect of an attack in Pokémon terms. No, not even if the damage is coming from the “effect text” of an attack instead of being a number printed beside the attack. There are better Abilities, but at least this keeps Mewtwo V-Union from having to worry about Special Conditions, attacks that might bounce it, attacks that might KO or discard it without doing damage, attacks that discard Energy, etc. It also means it is immune to damage counters placed by attacks through means other than doing damage e.g. in the mirror match, neither Mewtwo V-Union can hurt the other with Psysplosion.

Alright, one last attack to cover for Mewtwo V-Union, and it is “Final Burn”. Priced an even heftier [PPPC], it does 300 damage. Going just by printed HP scores, this means anything that is not a Pokémon VMAX or V-Union would be OHKO’d by this attack, plus the smallest Pokémon VMAX and V-Unions. Weakness, Resistance, and other card effects can vary this drastically. On one hand, this seems good in terms of raw power. On the other hand, four Energy – three of which are a specific type – on a V-Union and there’s a decent chunk of high profile targets that can just avoid being OHKO’d. Thankfully, a lead-in Psysplosion, as well as other damage counter placing tricks, can likely make up that gap. So, overall, I’d say Final Burn is good, but a bit shy of being great.

When you put it all together, Mewtwo V-Union is another solid Pokémon V-Union. It does some stuff better and some stuff worse than our previous two V-Unions, so in the end, this piece – and the overall Pokémon – earns a three-out-of-five. I almost gave this piece and the overall Pokémon a higher score in Expanded. There is so much better support for it there: Battle Compressor, Weakness Guard Energy, Dimension Valley, Malamar… but all this is available to its competition, and countering all of these things is just much easier here.

Ratings

SW – Black Star Promos SWSH162

Standard: 3/5
Expanded: 3/5

Mewtwo V-Union (Overall)

Standard: 3/5
Expanded: 3/5

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