If you’re reading this, then I forgot to
write an actual intro.
Stats
Ditto
is a Basic Pokémon, the best Stage to be
right now; minimum deck space and easy
to get into play.
It is a Colorless-Type Pokémon,
so it won’t have to worry about natural
Weakness or Resistance in Modified;
granted, the card has no built in
attacks so they wouldn’t matter anyway.
Being Colorless also allows
Ditto to tap
Aspertia City Gym for +20 HP,
pumping its low 70 HP (for Basic Pokémon
that don’t Evolve) to a sturdier 90 HP
that is actually likely to survive a
mid-level attack.
Ditto
has Fighting Weakness, but while its HP
is low for a Pokémon that doesn’t
Evolve, it is just out of the range of
an easy OHKO for the faster
Fighting-Type Pokémon… that is to say,
the ones that attack for a single
Energy.
Any serious attack from a
Fighting-Type would have OHKOed
Ditto anyway, since I usually
consider averaging 70 points of damage
to be the cut-off.
It will mostly be the odd
mid-level attack that often isn’t
heavily used that will suddenly score a
OHKO.
Ditto
has no Resistance; no Resistance is the
worst Resistance but is also quite
common, so it doesn’t really hurt the
card so much as fail to help it. To
finish the Stats, we’ll look at the
Retreat.
Ditto just needs a single Energy to
retreat; this is easy to pay plus you
have the option of using
Skyarrow
Bridge.
Effects
Ditto
posses a single Ability and nothing
else.
Said Ability is Transform, and it
allows you to play another Basic Pokémon
on top of
Ditto and treat
Ditto as that Pokémon.
You may only do this if
Ditto doesn’t already have a Pokémon
attached to it via the effect of
Transform, and there is (at least for
the foreseeable future) no way to
discard whatever you Transformed into
from
Ditto.
This is an odd effect, and at a glance
looks nearly worthless, but I’ll cover
what you can and should do with it in
the Usage section.
Here I’ll just emphasize that
once
Ditto uses Transform to “become” a
Pokémon, for game purposes it is that
Pokémon.
If something shuts down
Abilities,
Ditto remains whatever Pokémon it
has Transformed into.
The Basic Pokémon
Ditto has Transformed into not only
counts as a Basic Pokémon, but if all
other conditions are met you can even
Evolve it (and then it counts as an
Evolved Pokémon).
It is also important to note that while
Ditto becomes something else, it
retains all effects and counters that
are on it.
If
Ditto was affected by a Special
Condition before Transforming, it will
be afterwards when it is considered the
attached Pokémon.
Usage
So why use
Ditto?
While not as hyped, if you have a
deck that desperately needs to start
with a specific Pokémon (or even one of
a group of Pokémon), coupled with search
and/or draw power
Ditto becomes a spare, variable copy
of those Pokémon, allowing you greater
flexibility and greater reliability.
For example, if you wished to run an
extremely aggressive deck built around
Tornadus EX (BW: Dark Explorers
90/108, 108/108), the vast majority of
the time you will want to start with it.
If you only run
Tornadus EX, the odds of opening
with no Pokémon are painfully high;
prepare to give your opponent a free “Bill”
many games, and sometimes an even bigger
free draw.
Ditto allows you to run up to eight
Basic Pokémon that are essentially the
same one.
It also helps when you have multiple
starters meant for optimizing scenarios.
With the same example, you
probably wouldn’t want an aggressive
Tornadus EX deck that was only
Ditto and
Tornadus EX; a single
Sigilyph (BW: Dragons Exalted
52/124) would shut your game down
entirely, and Lightning-Type decks would
be a serious threat due to
Tornadus EX possessing Weakness
towards that Type.
So whatever flavor back-up Basic
Pokémon attacker you run,
Ditto improves your starts.
Provided you can follow up, it
gives you a 2/3s chance of starting with
the “correct” attacker (provided you run
an even amount of each).
Of course, I haven’t even gotten to what
really has people excited.
As previously stated,
Ditto essentially “becomes” whatever
Basic Pokémon you play on top of it via
Transform but retains all game effects
that were “on”
Ditto, and this includes “time spent
in play”.
So if you Bench a
Ditto on one turn, the next turn you
may not only use Transform to turn to
play a Basic Pokémon on top of it, but
that Basic Pokémon is considered to have
been in play for the same amount of time
as
Ditto was; you can immediately
Evolve it!
Adding yet another card to the already
resource intensive process can seem
counterintuitive, but this creates a
“buffer” for lower HP Evolving Basic
Pokémon.
You still need to be careful,
since
Ditto isn’t that much bigger than
most of them, and unless you pack
healing an opponent can damage
Ditto to prevent you from using
Transform to become something smaller
the next turn, but that is usually
preferable to them dealing with your
current Active Pokémon or flat out
OHKOing something small like a
Tynamo (any version).
This may even revive some more
interesting uses for Evolutions.
With recursion cards, you can use
multiple copies of
Ditto to make a lower count
Evolution line function as if it were
bigger.
Something that probably won’t see
much play now but which will have access
to better combos in the future is
Raticate (BW: Boundaries Crossed
105/149), but
Rattata (BW: Boundaries Crossed
104/149) only has 30 HP!
If you had a deck that wanted to use
Raticate, you could run several
Ditto and recursion (like
Rescue Scarf) so that a 1-1 or 2-2
line was all you needed, and you didn’t
run as big a risk of a
Rattata open.
You just keep dropping
Ditto that you can instantly
Transform into your recycled
Rattata and Evolve into your also
recycled
Raticate!
So for Modified,
Ditto looks to be a great card in
some specific decks, but it does have
one last use for more general plays; the
fact that
Ditto allows you to obscure your
future plays and/or adjust them.
You can play
Ditto and begin preparing it to
become one Pokémon, but then if the
situation warrants you can use Transform
to turn it into a different Pokémon more
appropriate to the current state of the
game.
Remember, I am talking about
changing your mind before you use
Transform; once you become something,
you’re stuck as it!
For Unlimited, we have
Broken Time Space for Pokémon
wishing to Evolve quickly, but you still
should give
Ditto a look if you just need to pad
out your Basic Pokémon count.
For Limited,
Ditto is a must run; even if you
have no true surprises in your deck, you
can use it to bluff your opponent.
Just be careful since you won’t
have the draw/search power to get a
target to Transform into.
Ratings
Unlimited:
2/5
Modified:
3.5/5
Limited:
4.8/5
Summary
Ditto
is another odd card to rate; technically
it can be used in every deck, but it can
only be used well in some specific ones,
and deck lists are still incredibly
tight.
It isn’t for every deck, but it
is in enough decks you had better learn
what it is and what it does, and
probably should pick up your own play
set just in case.
Ditto
clocked in at number seven on my own
list, right after
Town Map, but while
Ditto serves decks less well in
general, I think I had that backwards;
Ditto is probably going to become a
vital, common play for decks with low
HP, Evolving Basic Pokémon, plus some
that just need it for an extra Basic or
a method of obscuring planned
strategies.
