|
At last we come to our number one choice for the Top 5
Reprints of BW: Legendary Treasures.
That card is…
Energy Switch!
Energy Switch
is a handy little Item that allows you to move a Basic
Energy card from one of your Pokémon to another of your
Pokémon.
Though Pokémon players don’t dwell on raw card advantage
as much as games with lesser forms of draw power, this
would be a “-1”: your hand drops by a card and you have
no additional resources in play.
As was proven by successful
Darkrai EX
decks last format, it turns out this is worthwhile trick
when used properly.
What is “proper use”?
As in
Darkrai EX decks, allowing Energy acceleration such
as Dark Patch
to apply to a broader range of targets than
Dark Patch
would normally allow, in this case accelerating a Basic
Darkness Energy to a non-Darkness-Type or (as is the
main use) accelerating it to your Active Pokémon.
It can also be used when triggering certain
effects; again referencing
Darkrai EX,
you can drop a Basic
Darkness Energy
on your Active Pokémon and retreat for free via Dark
Cloak, and follow-up by using
Energy Switch
to move that Energy to your new Active Pokémon.
There are tricks such as yanking Energy off of a doomed
Pokémon, which is especially effective if you still have
enough Energy to use a lesser attack, and essentially
Energy Switch
meant the attacker was “just borrowing” that Energy
until you got it to its final destination.
Related to this is abusing specific card effects,
like Max Potion:
you can use a Pokémon that attacks well for a single
Energy and can take at least one hit, get off an attack,
then get it back to the Bench, move its Energy to a
spare attacker, and use a
Max Potion
to flush away all damage that was on your previous
Active Pokémon.
This is not a card that every deck can use, but
that Darkrai EX
decks used quite well and that a few other more recent
decks should also do well.
In Unlimited, this card suffers the same problems that
kept it from being useful for its long and mostly
uneventful life; moving a single basic Energy just
doesn’t help enough.
There might be a few decks that would prove to be
exceptions, but they’ll be competing against the
surviving First Turn Win decks, the One Turn Win decks
(that used to be First Turn decks with low odd, but now
can’t work first turn at all), various lock decks… and
of course, just the traditional raw power that comes
from such an expansive card pool.
Odds are you’ll have better forms of Energy
acceleration or be relying mostly on Special Energy or
both.
In Limited, this is a must play unless you are running a
+39 deck… as there will be no other Pokémon to shift to
in such a deck.
Ratings
Unlimited:
1/5
Modified:
3.5/5
Limited:
4.9/5
Summary
Energy Switch
is a card that is very useful in specific decks but not
in others, hence its seemingly low score.
I did have it as my number one pick, because I
did not pick any cards that were already legal without
needing a reprint: another
Darkrai EX,
Mewtwo EX,
or Keldeo EX
doesn’t really have a big impact right now.
Getting
Energy Switch should at least help
Darkrai EX
decks and probably a few others.
|
