Misty’s Determination – Hidden Fates Pokemon Review

Otaku

Another Throwback Thursday, and our third day of double reviews! Why? There were a ridiculous amount of reprints in Hidden Fates, but most were Alternate A reprints from the Shiny Vault subset or of cards that are already Standard-legal. There were two huge exceptions, and one of them was Misty’s Determination, originally released as XY – BREAKpoint 104/122, reprinted as XY – Evolutions 80/108, 108/108, and now as Hidden Fates 62/68. This Trainer-Supporter requires you discard a card from your hand to use it, then has you look at the top eight cards of your deck, add one of those cards to your hand, and finally shuffle the rest back into your deck. This is not a search you can fail, because Misty’s Determination can grab any card.

We’ve reviewed Misty’s Determination about two and a half years ago; I wasn’t too fond of it, but I made it clear that was because we had better options. I may have been a bit too hard on Misty’s Determination, but even if you think the opposite – that I was going to easy on it – we don’t have as many useful search options as we did and we’ve even lost some useful discarding options. In both cases, Ultra Ball is a great example of what we used to enjoy; in particular, Ultra Ball could often initiate a chain of events, fetching something else to get what we needed (or another search effect to get what we needed).

Besides, some decks did find a good use for Misty’s Determination during its previous tenure, digging out cards which belonged to hard-to-search categories. In Standard, we now have more cards that are hard to search out and fewer search options in general.  While Expanded remains roughly the same, I think I was a little too hard on Misty’s Determination even there. As this card exists in older expansions, where you could pull at least one copy of Misty’s Determination to use in Limited Format play, so I’ll go ahead and score her this time.

Ratings

• Standard: 3.3/5
• Expanded: 2/5
• Limited: 4/5

Misty’s Determination didn’t make our countdown, nor did the other significant reprint we’re looking at today because we decided to save them for Throwback Thursday. I’m fairly certain at least one (if not both) would have made our countdown, otherwise… though neither would have dethroned tomorrow’s number one pick.

Vince

Standard: 3/5

Expanded: 2/5

Limited: 4/5