Mime Jr. – Pokemon Throwback Thursday

aroramage

The Lost Zone mechanic came back to us with Prism cards, and now with the new Lost March strategy, it’s getting expanded upon. It’s hard to believe that there used to only be one real strategy for the deck prior to all of this, but believe it or not, that’s exactly what today’s card helped out with!

Mime Jr. is a Basic Psychic Pokemon, 30 HP, with no Weakness or Resistance and a Retreat Cost of 0. Sounds like the start of a crazy Pokemon, right? Well, it does have the Sweet Sleeping Face Poke-Body, which is something many “baby” Pokemon shared at the time. Basically your opponent can’t damage Mime Jr. as long as it’s asleep, and Sleepy Lost does exactly that, as well as removes a card from the top of your opponent’s deck and puts it into the Lost Zone. All for no cost whatsoever!

Mime Jr. is one of the easiest ways to put cards into the Lost Zone, and it featured prominently in the LostGar deck that centered around putting Pokemon in the Lost Zone for the purpose of winning via Lost World. Of course Gengar Prime was the primary attacker, but Mime Jr. is such an essential part of the deck, it’s hard to imagine the deck without it. In today’s format, it would likely play a role in breaking Unown MISSING!

So keep that in mind.

Rating

Standard: N/A (definitely would be around a 4/5 just for the potential to break a game)

Expanded: N/A (but overall, it’s a generally small Pokemon with a useful attack)

Limited: 3/5 (now if only it didn’t go to sleep every time it used it…)

Arora Notealus: Baby Pokemon like Mime Jr. haven’t shown up since the time of HGSS, mostly because there’s not really a good spot for them in today’s game. Possibly they’ll return with a very similar role to what they shared in previous iterations, but we’ll have to see if the Pokemon Company even needs to consider the idea.

Next Time: Powerful winds sweeping across the plains!

Vince

Surprisingly, this is a card which I still have: Mime Jr. from Call of Legends! It is one of those baby Pokémon that doesn’t evolve because Mr. Mine is also a Basic Pokémon. There are many old cards that does allow baby Pokémon to evolve, mostly from Baby Evolution Poke-Power, but that’s not the case for HGSS series baby Pokémon. Instead they got the Sweet Sleeping Face Poke-Body, which blocks all damage from your opponent’s Pokemon, as along as the recipient of the Poke Body is Asleep. This is risky to rely upon since the coin flips can fail you. Ideally, you would use an attack, fall asleep, flip tails, your opponent can’t damage you, flip heads, and resume with your attack. Yeah, that’s too much to ask for.

Every HGSS baby Pokemon has a free attack that puts you to sleep, and Mime Jr. is no exception. Sleepy Lost puts the top card from your opponent’s deck into the Lost Zone. Cards in the Lost Zone cannot be recovered, so your opponent will accept that one of their cards will be in the Lost Zone. This should be a powerful effect, but is offset by Mime Jr’s attributes, mostly its HP. It may not have any weakness or retreat cost, but it has 30 HP, which is very, very low. Even the Sweet Sleeping Face is being played around because it doesn’t protect you from damage counter placements. It’ll take a Hypnotoxic Laser and Virbank City Gym to KO it without having to attack. As such, you would be lucky to use Sleepy Lost more than once. Switching cards also bypass the effect of the Poke-Body due to being sent to the Bench and loses the sleep special condition.

I don’t recall how much Mime Jr. saw play, but I guess it helps to try and banish some cards to help with a win condition such as Lost World. If the top card of your opponent’s deck is a Pokémon, well, that’s progress for you. Based on one older review that I’ve read here, Mime Jr. can somewhat get the job done. You can use Slowking’s second sight to look at either player’s the top three cards from their deck and rearrange them. If one of the three cards is a Pokémon, you would obviously put that Pokémon on top of the deck, ready to be sent to the Lost Zone, fulfilling 1/6 of the requirement Lost World needs. But Second Sight can whiff if there’s no Pokémon there, so at best, you can find a crucial card and get rid of it. Can you put six Pokémon in the Lost Zone as fast as your opponent taking six easy prizes? I’m not too sure, it could be the other way around.

Ratings:

Standard: N/A (If this is legal now, it wouldn’t see as much play still…)

Expanded: N/A (…because there are many ways to play around.)

Limited: 2/5 (You’ll have to rely on a lot of luck to eventually make your opponent deck out.)

Legacy: 2/5 (This score is based on older reviews since most of them said that it’s hard to use Mime Jr. reliably)

Notes: I actually liked this card, but I am not convinced that it’ll be dominant enough that everyone else would have to worry about it. So many things can go wrong against what would’ve been a powerful disruptive Pokemon to abuse. Girafarig from last week’s COTD would’ve been a better user to send two cards from your opponent’s discard pile onto the Lost Zone instead of just the top card.

Next up: One of your Johto Legendary Beast trio finally gets the “two-prize” treatment.

Otaku

Today’s Throwback is Mime Jr. (Call of Legends 47/95), a [P] Type Basic Pokémon with 30 HP, no Weakness, no Resistance, a free Retreat Cost, the Poké-Body “Sweet Sleeping Face”, and the attack “Sleepy Lost”. Sweet Sleeping Face prevents all damage done to Mime Jr. while it is Asleep, while Sleepy Lost costs [0] and puts the top card of your opponent’s deck into the Lost Zone, then puts Mime Jr. to Sleep. This card was officially released February 9, 2011, in Call of Legends, a kind of catch-all set for the remaining HS-era cards (largely promo versions of existing cards) that had yet to be released outside of Japan. It isn’t a typo that I left off the “HS” prefix when naming the set; for some reason Call of Legends was technically released as a stand-alone set and not officially as part of the HS-series, even though it uses their formatting and contains reprints of cards from those sets, in addition to some new cards. I do not recall when new releases officially became tournament legal back then, but Mime Jr. left the Standard Format (along with the rest of the Call of Legends) when it rotated to BW-On (approximately September 1, 2012).

I cannot tell you how significant the [P] Typing was for this card, though as Mime Jr. does no damage with its attack, your opponent’s Weakness and Resistance are non-issues. Mime Jr. is old enough that being a Basic Pokémon was not automatically the best, though it was by the end of its Standard-legal tenure. 30 HP wasn’t quite as awful back then as it is now, but it still was quite fragile. No Weakness and a free Retreat Cost are the best; no Resistance is technically the worst, but with only 30 HP it wouldn’t likely have mattered even if it was here. Poké-Bodies are an older mechanic similar to Abilities. The short version is that the original non-attack effects were called “Pokémon Powers”, and “Poké-Bodies” are a subclass of them. Relevant to this review, there were some effects that could counter Poké-Bodies, even in the HS-On Standard Format. During that time, Sweet Sleeping Face proved fairly effective. Not just on Mime Jr. as multiple Pokémon during this time were sporting it. There were ways to deal with it, whether using an attack that ignored all effects on the opponent’s Active, forcing something else into the Active Position to attack, or being really lucky and the Pokémon waking up before your turn began. On its own, Sleepy Lost is luck-based disruption, just based on your opponent’s topdecked card instead of a coin flip. Without Sweet Sleeping Face it might be subpar, even for no Energy, though losing something to the Lost Zone is always scary as there was and still is no way to reclaim such cards.

Mime Jr. saw some successful competitive play in disruption decks, specifically those built around Lost World, a Stadium we’ve looked at for a past Throwback Thursday. If you need a refresher, once during your turn before you attack (or do anything else that would automatically end your turn) Lost World lets the turn player declare him- or herself the winner IF six or more of the opposing player’s Pokémon are in the Lost Zone. Mime Jr. was used by decks that wanted to simultaneously stall, disrupt the opponent, and potentially meet the conditions required of Lost Zone. There are several combo pieces that could work with Mime Jr.

• Gengar (HS – Triumphant 94/102)
• Slowking (HS – Gold & SoulSilver 12/123; Call of Legends 32/95)
• Vileplume (HS – Undaunted 24/90)
• Weavile (HS – Undaunted 25/90)

Gengar, known informally as Gengar Prime because “Prime” is the name of its card rarity, can send multiple Pokémon to the Lost Zone at a time due to its Poké-Body and attacks, but to do so more efficiently than Sleepy Lost requires preparations. Speaking of Sleepy Lost, it is much more effective when backed by Slowking and its “Second Sight” Poké-Power, capable of viewing and rearranging the top three cards of either player’s deck; if you had two copies of it, you could simultaneously improve your own draws while manipulating those of your opponent. The Vileplume listed has a Poké-Power that prevents either of you from playing Item cards from hand. Yes, it says “Trainers” in the actual card text, but this was when “Trainers” excluded Supporter and Stadium cards. How that ties into Mime Jr. that, as a vicious control strategy, Vileplume could be used with the Supporter Seeker. Seeker forces each player to bounce one of their Benched Pokémon back to hand. Not only could this help set up for one of Gengar Prime’s attacks, but if you bounced your Vileplume while you had a Gloom ready to Evolve, you could play Items before locking them back down. Weavile had a coming-into-play Poké-Power that let you see your opponent’s hand and discard a card from it. I don’t recall them all being run together in the same deck, nor would I recommend it, but two or three of these Pokémon would often partner up, even the two Stage 2 cards! The decks weren’t tops, but they were good enough to be seen as “competitive”, if only just.

So, what if Mime Jr. was reprinted? I cannot tell if we are “due” for a Mime Jr. or if we’re all-but-guaranteed it won’t be happening because today’s Mime Jr. IS the newest one! It and all the other “Baby” Pokémon haven’t been used since Call of Legends (or before). If it did happen, Sweet Sleeping Face would need to be rewritten as an Ability, so it wouldn’t even be a true reprint. Sweet Sleeping Face also wouldn’t be much protection between Alolan Muk, Escape Rope, Guzma, Bench hits, Ability based damage counters, and just plain old bad luck with coin flips. Sleepy Lost might be nice, though. We don’t have Lost World but we do have Unown (SM – Lost Thunder 92/214) and its “Missing” Ability. Mime Jr. would really need to be re-released alongside some of its older deckmates, other than Vileplume as the newer Vileplume (XY – Ancient Origins 3/98) does what it does, but with more 20 more HP. If you’re actually playing in a Limited Format event with Call of Legends packs, the Mime Jr. is a great pull; stall and disrupt! You can still enjoy it in the PTCGO-exclusive Legacy Format, which uses the cards from the HS-series, Call of Legends, and the BW-series. I don’t recall it being part of a dominant deck, and good luck finding an opponent without setting something up in advance, but I did run into multiple variants using it and sometimes they were almost auto-losses even for otherwise competitive decks I might be running.

Ratings

Standard: N/A

Expanded: N/A

Limited: 3.75/5

Legacy: 3.25/5