Misty & Lorelei – Cosmic Eclipse Pokemon Review

Vince

Misty & Lorelei rounds up this weekend’s reviews. Misty specializes in water types while Lorelei specializes in Ice types, and in the TCG, both Water and Ice types are designated to be Water types, which is fitting for this card when you read the effects. Not only it grabs you 3 water energies, but if you can pay the steep price of discarding 5 cards from your hand, then your Water Pokemon gets to use their GX attacks even after you already used one. While this might seem game breaking, it’s important to know which GX Water Pokemon would make use of pulling off extra GX attacks.

I won’t be able to provide examples here, but if you research all of the GX Water Pokemon in the database, than you would have a clear idea of what to use. And it’s not just Water Pokemon strictly printed on a card, there could be a Pokémon with a different type that also became Water Pokemon. Vaporeon from XY Ancient Origins has the Aqua Effect ability that makes Stage 1 Pokemon gain the water typing, so that means all of the Stage 1 GX Pokemon can become water types in addition to its existing typing, and that’s widens the scope of which GX attacks to repeatedly use. A full four of Exeggcute’s Propagation won’t fully cover the discard cost but it eases the pain.

At the end of the day, Misty and Lorelei is a specialized card that sees a lot of play in very few decks (specifically decks that uses water energies), but almost see no play elsewhere.

Ratings:

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

Oh, and next week is Eeveelutions week. At the same time, I got randomly selected for jury duty, so I better finish the next five reviews and post them before I could get too busy past Monday.

Otaku

We’ve reviewed the other five TAG TEAM Supporters, so the completionist in me is happy we’re reviewing the sixth and final one as we close this week with Misty & Lorelei (SM – Cosmic Eclipse 199/236).  As with all TAG TEAM Supporters, there is a primary effect and a secondary effect; the primary effect is mandatory unless you cannot actually perform it, which in this case would require you had no cards in your deck.  The secondary effect is optional except under the rare circumstance were you simply cannot perform any of the primary effect.  You decide whether or not to use the secondary effect – and pay its discard requirement – when you go to use the card, before carrying out the primary effect.

So, the primary effect of Misty & Lorelei is searching your deck for up to three [W] Energy and adding them to your hand.  The card doesn’t specify “basic” Water Energy cards, but those are the only ones that count as [W] when not in play.  Unless you have zero cards in your deck, you’ll need to search, even if you know you have zero basic Water Energy in there.  In Standard, you really might need three basic Energy or three basic Water Energy cards all at once… but if that was truly all you needed, then Lady just does the job better as she lets you snag up to four basic Energy from your deck, which can be of any Type (or combination of Types).

The secondary effect has a massive discard cost of five cards from your hand.  Again, this cost is paid before you do perform the primary effect, so don’t count on that search helping you out… unless you’re using another copy of Misty & Lorelei after the first.  What do you gain for your efforts?  Another use of your GX-attack, at least for your [W] Type Pokémon.  You cannot use this effect if you still haven’t used your GX-attack for the game, and the Typing of whatever originally used your GX-attack doens’t matter; only [W] Types can use it again, and it must be this turn.  The entire point of GX-attacks is that you only get to use one during a game, so this is pretty impressive, even factoring in the cost.

This week has been all about cards that did not make our recent countdown but were already seeing a notable degree of competitive success. When I first learned of Misty & Lorelei, I expected to see some [W] decks running it for the secondary effect while still benefiting from the primary, and that we’d see some vicious power plays from it.  As long as you could spare a Supporter usage that turn, you could achieve overwhelming force through GX-attack after GX-attack.  It shouldn’t take too many, after all, as most of the best GX-attacks hit so hard they’re likely to score a OHKO… sometimes more than one at a time!

Instead, Misty & Lorelei only showed up in two distinct decks: ADP and Pidgeotto Control.  ADP is the simple name for the not-so-simple decks built around Arceus & Dialga & Palkia-GX.  They typically feature attackers of multiple Types, but one of the regulars is Keldeo-GX.  It’s “Resolute Blade-GX” attack is great against decks that fill their Bench… or that have at least a few Pokémon Benched and are [W] Weak.  Pidgeotto Control is apparently the name for the Oranguru (SM – Ultra Prism 114/156) control decks that are backed Pidgeotto (SM – Team Up 123/181).  Of course, the deck does feature a variety of attackers, but Oranguru’s “Resource Management” attack is usually pretty vital.  The deck runs Articuno-GX for its Energy-discarding “Cold Crush-GX” attack, and stripping your opponent’s Active of all their attached Energy… and I can see why a Control deck that excels at recycling its own cards could afford Misty & Lorelei just to use Cold Crush-GX more than once per game.

I don’t have any data for Misty & Lorelei in Expanded, but the Theorymon is somewhat promising.  No specific decks to consider but all [W] Pokémon-GX are legal here, which means any of their GX-attacks could be spammed thanks to this card.  What is more, you’ve got better support to actually use Misty & Lorelei, whether it is Tapu Lele-GX to fetch it from the deck, VS Seeker to reuse it, or Exeggcute (BW – Plasma Freeze 4/116; BW – Plasma Blast 102/101) to minimize the discard cost.  Finally, and this is what could theoretically break this card someday, you’ve got effects that can change a Pokémon’s Type.  Any Stage 1 Pokémon-GX can become a [W] Type thanks to Vaporeon (XY – Ancient Origins 22/98).  We get a taste of that in Standard, where either version of Sivally-GX can use Water Memory to shift Types, but this means the GX-attacks for all of these Pokémon can be reused with the secondary effect of Misty & Lorelei-GX!

That’s the only bright spot for this card’s future, I think, as Pokémon-V are replacing Pokémon-GX, the same way Pokémon-GX replaced Pokémon-EX.  Pokémon-GX don’t have GX-attacks, so a card whose strength is letting you get off extra GX-attacks from [W] Types isn’t getting new ammunition.  Technically new combo partners can show up, but they’ll be from stuff copying attacks, changing the Types of existing Pokémon-GX, working with stuff like Normalium Z: Tackle, etc.  Things are odd for Misty & Lorelei in the Limited Format.  Tag Call is in this set, but if your deck doesn’t run at least partially on basic Water Energy or contain one of the two [W] Type Pokémon-GX, you’d just be including Misty & Lorelei to take a peek at your deck… which is plausible, as that is much more valuable in Limited.  Decks that can use it “for real” will find it quite potent.

Ratings

Standard: 3/5

Expanded: 3/5

Limited: 3/5

Misty & Lorelei is the most deck-specific of the TAG TEAM Supporters, so while its overall effect is very strong, they just aren’t likely to see as much play.  They certainly give us enough reason to give all of our [W] Type Pokémon-GX another look, and maybe a few others via combos.  I don’t know whether to call them lucky for working their way into a few decks where the [W] Type Pokémon-GX aren’t main attackers, or unlucky that there aren’t more decks built around [W] Type Pokémon-GX attacking.  Just add it to that long list of cards that are kind of useful now, but shouldn’t be forgot because of their long term potential.