Shaymin Prism Star – Pokemon Team Up Review

Vince

Shaymin Prism Star is one of those cards where there’s two sides of a coin. On one hand, it can be a pretty powerful attacker despite needing GG to attack. Flower Storm does 30 damage for each basic energy attached to all of your Pokemon. With Choice Band and nine basic energies on the board, you can OHKO any Pokemon in the game. There are ways to get energy into play or to manipulate them. Vikavolt SUM can fetch a Grass and a Lightning energy, which can add 60 damage to Flower Storm, and possibly boost Rayquaza-GX’s Emerald Break in the process. Venusaur Shining Legends can utilize its Jungle Totem to double the unit of basic grass energies, as a single Grass energy becomes 2 units of Grass energy. Five Grass energies is needed to OHKO anything in this case. Free retreat helps if somehow Shaymin Sky is still there, you can bring in another heavy hitter.

On the other side of the coin, it is a Prism Star which limits you to one of the same name per deck, and that it gets sent to the Lost Zone if it ever tries to go to the discard pile. You literally have only one shot at this, and it’s 80 HP isn’t going to last long. It could hit extremely hard, but it’ll go down just as fast on the opponent’s next turn (assuming they’re fully set up). The attack cost of GG suggests that it can only fit into few decks. Still, when looking at the pros and cons of Shaymin Prism Star, this is one Pokémon you could consider using. It even showed up on a almost straight Celebi & Venusaur-GX deck as an alternate attacker to favorably trade prizes.

Ratings:

• Standard: 3/5
• Expanded: 3/5
• Limited: 3.5/5

aroramage

There’s always got to be one of those crazy Pokemon <Prism> hanging around. They’re usually meant to have powerful attacks or Abilities, which is the reason they only run at a single copy each. At least they’re not like ACE SPECs, which you could only have one ACE SPEC per deck and only one copy of it. Isn’t that great? At least there are <Prism> cards that can attack!

Shaymin <Prism> is a Basic Grass Pokemon <Prism>, 80 HP, with a Fire Weakness, no Resistance, and a Retreat Cost of 0! Flower Storm is the only move he needs, since it lets you load an entire bag with flower petals before dumping it in front of the giant fan that’s kept in the corner of any open convention center specifically for the purpose of using this attack. Course supposedly it causes too much of a ruckus and blows everyone’s cards away, so they’ve been making it do 30 damage for every basic Energy attached to all of your Pokemon ever since the Petal Dance Incident of 1912.

With the general tendency to lean towards accelerating Energy out ASAP, Shaymin <Prism> can benefit a lot of Grass decks by being a powerful attacker. It only takes 6 Energy in play to start earning 2 Prizes per KO, if you manage to attack a GX with this. Tag Team-GX will require more Energy in play, but 10 Energy will KO anything at the rate of 30 per Energy. And it is not that hard to get out 10 Energy in play to get this to work, never mind if they’re Weak to Grass or not.

Of course being a one-of, he might not see play in every match-up, but he’ll always be able to swing in the matches he does show up in. Unless he gets KO’d himself, which at 80 HP won’t be very hard, and then he’s removed from the game.

Rating

Standard: 3/5 (a strong one-of in any Grass deck)

Expanded: 3/5 (just generally powerful on his own, and able to OHKO most Pokemon easily)

Limited: 4.5/5 (it’d be hard to argue against his power)

Arora Notealus: Shaymin <Prism> definitely has a spot to be tucked away into for most Grass decks. He could possibly be cut out in favor of something else, but the question that comes to mind is whether that card will be worth giving up on a Pokemon that can one-shot most competitors in the game with ease. And most of the time, I imagine the answer will be a big no!

Weekend Thought: Have you been seeing any of these cards show up lately? Are they proving to be troublesome? Or are they just being put aside into trade binders? What are your thoughts on cards that render specific types of cards like Items, Stadiums, Trainers, etc. useless? Or have some sort of effect that works against such cards?

Otaku

I’m embarrassed to be running late for the second day in a row. My apologies for this and the late review yesterday.

As for today’s topic, we’re looking at Shaymin {*} (SM – Team Up 10/181). The name means it does NOT count against the amount of Shaymin, Shaymin-GX, or any other Shaymin-based cards. As a Prism Star Pokémon, you may only run it as a single or not at all, and if it would hit the discard pile for any reason, instead Shaymin {*} is sent to the Lost Zone. Being a Prism Star also means Shaymin {*} can be fetched from your deck via Lisia or prevented from attacking thanks to the “Shady Tail” Ability found on Wobbuffet (SM – Lost Thunder 93/214). Shaymin {*} is a [G] Type, so it can take advantage of nice support like Net Ball, while also exploiting the Weakness found on some [F] Types like Diancie {*} and Lycanroc-GX (SM – Guardians Rising 74/145, 138/145, 156/145). There’s no [G] Resistance to worry about in the Standard or Expanded Format, and the only anti-[G] effect you’re likely to encounter is the “other” side of Parallel City… unless we have both a [G] deck and an opposing [Y] deck get big, then we might see Fairy Charm [G] show up.

As a Basic Pokémon, Shaymin {*} is as easy to run as any Pokémon in this game. One copy of Shaymin {*} only requires one slot from your deck and it can be immediately put into play, including serving as your opening Active… though that last bit may not be a good thing in this case. Many card effects naturally work better with Basic Pokémon because of these things, and there are also some bits of support specifically for the Stage. There are some counters that only apply to Basic Pokémon as well, but the net result is that Basic Pokémon probably have it the best as far as Stages of Evolution. Shaymin {*} has 80 HP, which is pretty low; it is a probable OHKO while Active and isn’t even somewhat vulnerable on the Bench. A small silver lining in Expanded is that Shaymin {*} is a legal target for the effects of Level Ball. [R] Weakness isn’t too bad right now; the low HP means Weakness can’t make things too much worse, and [R] Type attackers aren’t especially common right now, either. Lack of Resistance is the worse, but not only is it also quite common, again the HP means it wouldn’t make much of a difference. The free Retreat Cost is NOT common, but it is as good as it gets; it might even be a selling point for this card!

Shaymin {*} has only one effect, the attack “Flower Storm”. For [GG] it does 30 damage times the amount of basic Energy attached to all of your Pokémon. The effect isn’t great, but it seems adequate; as it only counts basic Energy cards, Flower Storm won’t benefit from things like Double Colorless Energy, but at least we aren’t limited to counting a single Energy Type. The rare “Energy multiplier” kind of effect, like the “Jungle Totem” Ability found on Vensaur (Shining Legends 3/73) would count, because it causes basic Grass Energy cards to provide [GG] instead of [G]… but they are still basic Grass Energy. The damage per Energy isn’t great, but as most of it doesn’t need to be attached to Shaymin {*} itself, it doesn’t need to be. The benefits from this kind of attack are how having a lot of Energy in play is usually its own reward and that it can be distributed among many other potential attackers. The main concern here is the awkward [GG] attack cost. Venusaur makes it an easy, single Energy attachment BUT that Venusaur has rarely – if ever – proven worthwhile in competitive play.

You’ll probably need to use something like Energy Switch to move a basic Grass Energy which is already in play onto a freshly Benched Shaymin {*}, then manually attach a second basic Grass Energy card before retreating or using an effect to get Shaymin {*} into your Active spot. Even then, you’ll need five to seven basic Grass Energy in play to swing for a “competitive” amount of damage… and your deck should NOT be built around attacking with Shaymin {*}. Due to its nature, it almost always going to be a one-time deal; the REST of your deck needs to be good at utilizing the basic Energy (probably basic Grass Energy) you’ll have in play. The range I gave was just for dealing with non-Pokémon-EX/GX or taking out Basic Pokémon-EX/GX other than Tag Team Pokémon. Mega Evolutions, Evolved Pokémon-GX, and Tag Team Pokémon will need more like seven to ten Energy, give or take a Choice Band or similar damage buff.

Shaymin {*} has seen some competitive success, though very, very slight. A little over a month ago, a Celebi & Venusaur-GX deck played by Ryne Morgan finished a 69th place finish at the Collinsville, IL Regional Championship. There were 1056 players at that event, so Ryne still managed to finish in the top 7% at that event. This deck offers a somewhat unique opportunity, as it is a “tank” deck, a kind of stall/control deck that still makes a serious effect to win through taking Prizes. This deck runs on just Double Colorless Energy and basic Grass Energy, and while it only builds the Energy in play slowly, through manual Energy attachments, it has the disruption, HP, and healing to actually do that. Shaymin {*} is there when it needs to attack with something that is not worth multiple Prize cards and/or to get around protective effects that would apply to Celebi & Venusaur-GX but not Shaymin {*}.

You’ll also see Shaymin {*} from time to time in functional, but not especially competitive, decks on the PTCGO. The odd Shining Genesect deck, which may be backed up by Naganadel or Venusaur or both. Other decks using Naganadel are an option, and maybe even some using Sceptile (SM – Celestial Storm10/168). I don’t recall seeing Shaymin {*} used in Expanded; the Standard Format decks I mentioned are even worse off there, and while you’d gain access to some older tricks, they either aren’t strong enough, are better used with something else, or both. Shaymin {*} is a great pull for the Limited Format; you’ll need to run a decent amount of basic Grass Energy so that you can afford to actually use Flower Storm, but any off-Type Energy you include is still going to be basic, so it will still feed the damage. Your opponent is unlikely to be able to attack Shaymin {*} on your Bench, so you can even benefit from it as a pivot Pokémon for most of the game, and attack once the time is right.

Ratings

Standard: 3/5

Expanded: 2.1/5

Limited: 4.3/5

Shaymin {*} isn’t a powerhouse, but it is a decent glass cannon. It is another card that relies heavily on the rest of the deck, and right now it doesn’t have the partners to really shine.