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Chandelure
(Plasma Freeze)
Hello and welcome to a short Bank Holiday week here on
Pojo’s
CotD. As is traditional we will be looking at
some of the cards that featured on individual reviewers’
top tens but didn’t quite
make our countdown of the best cards from Plasma Freeze.
We kick off the week with
Chandelure,
a Pokémon which the card designers usually make sure is
at least interesting.
This particular version is a Stage 2 Fire Type Plasma
Pokémon. Being Plasma is great because it gives access
to some fantastic support (Team Plasma Ball,
Colress Machine . . .).
Being a Fire Type is ok
. . . yeah, it’s weak to
Keldeo-EX, but on the other hand, it will hurt
just about everything in a
Klinklang deck. But being a Stage 2 is a major
downside: running Chandelure
will take up considerable space in your deck and
resources to get it out on the Field. It needs a big
time pay off to justify that.
And that pay off appears to come in the form of
Chandelure’s Flare Navigate
Ability. This is a once-per-turn Ability that allows you
to search your deck for a Fire Energy and attach it to
one of your Pokémon. The downside is that you have to
also put a damage counter on that Pokémon, but it seems
a relatively small price to pay for this kind of Energy
acceleration. Obviously this is a pretty good Ability,
even for a Stage 2 Pokémon. In fact it is very like
Typhlosion Prime’s
Afterburner Power, and I’m sure a lot of players
remember that being a big deal a couple of years ago.
There is one important difference though: Afterburner
allowed attachments from the discard pile (which was
easy to fuel with discarding attacks, creating a nice
cycle). Maintaining a supply of Fire Energy from the
deck is not so efficient as
it means using another card – Super Rod – to cycle the
Energy if necessary. As an attacker,
Chanderlure is pretty
uninspiring: Absorb Life does 70 and heals 30 for two
Fire and a Colourless Energy.
It’s not the worst attack you will see, but it’s not
going to be a weapon of choice either. This means that
Chandelure needs some
partners, and this is where things get a little bit
tricky.
Typhlosion
Prime’s preferred partner was always
Reshiram BLW, but that card
is showing its age now and 120 damage is not the threat
it once was now that the EX Pokémon have raised the HP
bar to 170+. This is also the problem affecting
Infernape PLS which has the
added issue of being another Stage 2. You could try
Chandelure with Pokémon that
don’t need a specific Energy Type like
Mewtwo-EX or
Bouffalant DRX, but the best
bet seems to be White Kyurem-EX
from BCR. If you can maintain the supply of Fire Energy
to this card, you can hit for 150 per turn plus Burn.
Throw in Hypnotoxic Laser
and Virbank City Gym and you
have a OHKO machine, capable
of taking down its fellow EXs with a single attack.
Whether Chandelure is
superior to the mass Energy acceleration offered by
Blastoise and Ability
Emboar is however
questionable.
And by questionable I mean this card is almost always
going to seem inferior: it’s much easier for those decks
to operate with just one Stage 2 set up. Maybe if
Emboar is rotated, this can
find a niche if a great Fire-dependant attacker comes
along. After all, Typhlosion Prime had to wait over a
year to find a suitable partner.
Rating
Modified: 3 (it’s the sort of card you keep in mind,
rather than rush to build decks with)
Limited: 3.25 (useful if you get it out)
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