Piers – Darkness Ablaze
Date Reviewed: January 6, 2021
Ratings Summary:
Standard: 2.00
Expanded: 2.00
Limited: 4.00
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is horrible. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Otaku
Piers is a Trainer-Supporter we first reviewed as the second best card of SW – Darkness Ablaze. However, if you read that review, you’ll find I was no longer convinced Piers was that good. You see, the effect of Piers is you search your deck for any one Energy card, and any one Darkness Pokémon. I was initially sold on it because you could use Piers to fetch Crobat V from your deck, plus a Special Energy card, and then play them both so you could still draw some cards after. Piers can grab basic Energy cards as well, but those are much easier to search out from your deck, and you typically are running more than four copies of them, unlike with Special Energy cards. So getting the special Energy cards and still drawing seemed great!
Emphasis on seemed: Quick Ball already makes it easy to fetch any Basic Pokémon from your deck, so decks do not typically need Piers to do that. What about snagging Special Energy cards? Until it rotates, Guzma & Hala lets you search out a Stadium, Tool, and Special Energy at the cost of itself and two additional cards from your hand. You can even opt to not discard, and just get a Stadium, and you can search Guzma & Hala from your deck with Tag Call. Mono- or mostly Darkness decks might prefer Piers, unless they have a lot of TAG TEAM cards, but everything else is probably already using and sticking with Guzma & Hala.
All hope is not lost for Piers. It has still shown up in the mono-Darkness Eternatus VMAX decks, but only some of the time. I don’t know if Piers is worth it in Expanded, but there are more options to do what it does here, so I’m thinking “No.”; I’ll give it an optimistic two-out-of-five because it might fit certain niche decks. In the Limited Format, everything it does is more valuable, including seeing your deck’s current contents. Run it! I still think Piers is a good, solid card, but it definitely did not deserve to be in our top 15 from SW – Darkness Ablaze, and its presence there was largely my fault. Which is why I want to make it clear, I didn’t have Piers on my best of 2020 list. He would have been 16th-Place if we’d done something like a top 20 for 2020.
Ratings
- Standard: 2/5
- Expanded: 2/5
- Limited: 4/5
Well… at least I raised its Limited Format score?
Vince
Vince had this at #12 on his personal Top 15 cards of 2020. Here is Vince’s review of Piers from last year.
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