Blaziken:

This Blaziken, while perhaps not as powerful as it's non-holo cousin, is still a powerful card.  Firestarter is a great power.  But since it is to the benched pokemon, it may not be quite as good as Fire Recharge.  Still, it is an automatic power, and can help to quickly power up your reserves and get a new pokemon rolling fast after your opponent has scored a knock out on you main attacker.  Fire Stream is also good.  3 energy and one discard for 50 is a standard Flamethrower like Arcanine has, but this is better, doing 10 to each opposing bench pokemon.  This coupled with 100 hp make this Blaziken very playable.

Unlimited:  It does decent damage and speeds up your pokemon, but still not enough:  2/5

Modified:  Nice.  When Entei/Cargo and Typhlosion is gone, the two Blazikens should go up significantly in popularity:  3.5/5

Limited:  If you can manage to get one out, he will work really well for you:  3.5/5

The Bottom Line:  3/5

Holo Blaziken

 

Well, here is Blaziken. Its Poke-Power is practically a non-flip Typhlosion Pokemon Power, with the important exception that it works only for Benched Pokemon. Its attack is also quite nice, doing 50 to the Active Pokemon and optionally doing 10 to your opponent's Benched Pokemon by detaching a Fire Energy from Blaziken and discarding it. For one Fire Energy and 2 Colorless Energies, that's pretty good.

 

Blaziken's Power can be comboed with cards such as Uncommon Delcatty and Camerupt. With some thought, the fact that you can only attach the Fire Energy card to a Benched Pokemon can be circumvented by playing cards like Switch, Warp Point and Warp Energy, or sometimes, by simply retreating.

 

Unlimited: In Unlimited it's good. You could attack turn 2 by a Double Colorless and a Fire, then attaching two Fire Energies per turn (one to Blaziken and the other from the discard pile to a Benched Pokemon). Or you could just use something like Juggler to discard the Fire Energies to the discard pile and get something like Blaine's Arcanine going quickly. The fact that Scizor and, to a lesser extent, Steelix, are playable in this format and are weak to it, makes it even better.

3.5/5

 

Modified: Well, I'm seriously doubting whether Nintendo will ever allow WotC-printed cards in their format, but anyway. Still, Camerupt and Delcatty are Nintendo cards, and they're pretty effective with Blaziken. I still rate Blaziken highly in this format.

3.5/5

 

Draft: Here it's nice to have. If you've drafted Combuskens and Torchics, then getting this is obvious. Both Combuskens are actually not bad in their own right, adding to the impetus of drafting them. Blaziken's combination of attack and Poke-power is superb in any format, not less this one.

4/5