Hello readers! Vince here with another late review…….and another look at my favorite Pokémon: Sylveon-EX! I can hear some of my colleagues who are reading this saying “Oh, here he goes again! He’s gonna 5/5 the heck out of any Sylveon card he reviews.” Well, I’ll try not to, but Sylveon-EX has been made somewhat relevant due to what she has to offer.
Being a Basic is the best due to the usual reasons: taking only a single slot in your deck and being able to put into play easier than Stage 1 or Stage 2 as well as benefitting from certain cards that supports Basic Pokémon. 170 HP is on the slightly low side though still enough to survive certain hits that’s not fully set up. Being a Fairy Type means she can only exploit weakness found on XY-era Dragon types. Being weak to Metal is concerning, but that depends on Metal attackers in question: Dusk Mane Necrozma-GX would achieve overkill anyways even if Sylveon has no weakness. Dark resistance may make Zoroark-GX work harder to achieve important numbers, which would be having 8 Pokemon in play and a Choice Band (which is only possible in Expanded). And a retreat cost of two is annoying that it would be better to pack in Fairy Garden or performing the pseudo-switch maneveur.
She has two attacks. Dress Up does 30 damage for CC, plus 30 more if she has a Pokémon Tool attaches to it. Precious Ribbon does 100 for YYC and moves a Y Energy from this Pokémon to one of your Benched Pokemon, and heal 50 damage from said Pokémon. These attacks may seem mediocre if you’re not thinking outside of the box, but lately, some people seem to have figured it out.
The decks that are frequently used are Buzzwole-GX variants and Malamar/Ultra Necrozma GX. Some new Pokémon from Celestial Storm have emerged, like Rayquaza-GX. Sylveon-EX can at least almost OHKO Ultra Necrozma and Rayquaza with boosted Dress Up backed with Choice Band, which is 180 damage. Precious Ribbon can secure the OHKO……if you have some source of Y energy and hoping that Max Elixirs cooperated. But what about Buzzwole-GX? Well, we turn to another partner.
Mew (XY Fates Collide)
This tiny one prize Pokemon has the ability called Memories of Dawn that can copy attacks from your Basic Pokémon in play. So Mew can easily copy Dress Up, and backed with Choice Band, it does 90 damage. Then, the Psychic Weakness found on Buzzwole-GX will mean that it’ll take 180 damage from Mew’s copied Dress Up.
So with Mew and Sylveon-EX, we founded a tech that can deal with some of the most used decks that we almost keep seeing everyday, and hopefully Sylveon-EX will emerge as the secret deck that is designed to take the entire competition down and win the whole thing, which Mega Audino EX managed to do back in 2016 Worlds.
Standard: 4/5
Expanded: 4/5
Limited: 4.5/5
Conclusion: Sylveon-EX may have waited for a moment to pounce, and it might just be the right timing to do so before it rotates. I haven’t even thought of my favorite Pokémon taking on the metagame until I watched a video of PTCGradio talking about it.