Baby Mario
2010 UK
National
Seniors
Champion |
Trick Coin
The Japanese card designers have always loved their coin
flips. Players less so. On
the one hand they introduce a kind of pseudo-balance to
powerful effects (I say ‘pseudo’ because they aren’t
balanced when they work); on the other they can lead to
wasted cards and attacks and don’t provide the reliable
basis that players need when planning strategies.
Trick Coin is a Tool which aims to help with
flippy attacks. Attach it to
the Pokémon of your choice and you get a do-over (if you
want it) for the flippy part
of an attack. This increases (but by no means
guarantees) you chance of getting the effect you want.
Downsides?
Oh yeah. For a start, attaching Trick Coin means that
you can’t use a Muscle Band, and you won’t be able to
attach it at all if your opponent attaches Head Ringer
or Jamming Net first. Item Lock prevents attachment, and
Startling Megaphone consigns Trick Coin to the discard
pile. Players hoping to combine Trick Coin with Victory
Star Victini have been
disappointed too, as the text
specifically forbids using more than one re-flip per
turn.
To be honest, I would go with
Victini over this card every time: despite the
possibility of starting with it, or being Ability-locked
by Garbodor, I would rather
have something sitting on the Bench I could use with any
flippy attacker and be free
to attach Muscle Band. At the moment, this isn’t a
choice I have to make, as there really isn’t anything in
the format that either Trick Coin or
Victini could turn into a
competitive option (yes, I am aware of
Malamar EX; no, I don’t
consider it competitive). Those little evolving Basics
that have a Status Condition flip are practically
non-existent at tournaments, and it’s certainly not
worth running Trick Coin to try and squeeze extra damage
out of something like Kangaskhan
EX when you could use Muscle Band instead.
Maybe we’ll get something in future that will make Trick
Coin worth a second look, but I would still prefer
Fliptini.
Rating
Modified: 1.75 (not much to use it with, and a better
option exists)
Expanded: 1.5 (play Fliptini)
Limited: 2.5 (if you pull a flippy
card, like Dedenne, you
might as well run this)
|
aroramage |
Picture this: you're walking down the street towards
your local Pokemon League when you pass by this alleyway
and see this guy huddled in a corner. He beckons you
over, making you promises of a rare coin that make you
the luckiest person in the world. Reluctant yet curious,
you walk over to him, and he hands you a golden coin
picturing a Zoroark on it. If you know Zoroark well
enough, you should know this guy in an alleyway - a
suspicious character to begin with - is probably not
giving you a lucky coin but a Trick Coin instead.
Welcome back to today's card of the day! Trick Coin
here, or "Trickery Coin" as it's called in Japan, is a
Tool-based Fliptini that works with the Pokemon it's
attached to. We all know how Fliptini works by now, I'm
sure, so Trick Coin just capitalizes on that and makes
it specifically about the Pokemon it's attached to and
only that Pokemon's attacks. There's going to be a lot
of coin-flip cards around, I can't even begin to name a
few, but I figured I'd look at one in particular that
could have Trick Coin used with it: Malamar-EX.
There's a reason we haven't talked much about Malamar-EX,
but the part I'm going to note for right now is his
MAXamar attack. MAXamar is essentially another variant
off of X Ball and Evil Ball, only instead of dealing 20
damage for each Energy, it deals 60 damage instead! The
only catch? You have to flip coins, and that's where
Trick Coin comes in. With it, you can potentially avoid
the negative effect of flipping all tails and dealing
nothing with a redo, or get another chance of hitting
all heads for lots of damage!
But just like Fliptini before it, Trick Coin only redoes
a luck-based factor, and because of that, it's not going
to see much in the way of competitive play. Why risk
flipping coins for damage when you can much more easily
deal straight up damage with Aegislash-EX, Dialga-EX,
even Gengar-EX? A printed number without the coin flips
is going to be infinitely better than any number tied to
a coin, and while Trick Coin can help alleviate the
randomness, it won't be a cure for it.
Not to mention there are much better Tools to use out
there.
Rating
Standard: 2.5/5 (fills a particular niche that didn't
need to be filled while also robbing Pokemon of better
Tools)
Expanded: 3/5 (here, I think it could work better with
Vanilluxe (NVI), so it's got that AND Fliptini)
Limited: 2.5/5 (again, Malamar-EX comes to mind, but
there's also Feraligatr, Gliscor, Escavalier, and Fearow
as other options)
Arora Notealus: Apparently "Trickery" is the Japanese
name for the Foul Play attack from the games, so this is
a Foul Play Coin in a way. Go figure!
Next Time: From the shadows emerges the eye!
|
Otaku |
A Pokémon Tool that helps with the
thrilling-yet-annoying coin flips involved in many
attacks: this has long been a dream of mine and I
suspect most long time players (there have been formats
practically made of attack-related coin flips). So is
Trick Coin (XY: Phantom Forces 108/119)
the fulfillment of that dream?
No, but then again for me that dream wasn’t an
aspiration but pure fantasy; most of us wanted something
that worked for all coin flips (not just attacks)
and/or had at least some guaranteed results. In short,
we wanted something that was probably broken or at least
of dubious balance. Trick Coin is instead the
Pokémon Tool equivalent of Victini (latest
printing BW: Legendary Treasures 23/113); if used
immediately after you finish making coin flips required
by an attack, you get to ignore the original results and
flip all those coins again. Technically you have the
same odds for the second attempt as you did the first,
but getting two attempts (and the fact that you should
be smart enough not to use the effect when you get
sufficient results the first time) means that in the end
you should get improved results.
Before I get onto application, let me just clarify the
effect; again its all or nothing as you can’t keep some
flips and redo others; if an attack requires four coin
flips, you must flip again for all four, whether it is
all four at once, four flips one at a time, or some
other combination. The card text also makes it clear
that this effect won’t stack with any other coin
flip manipulating effects: no pairing this up with the
aforementioned Victini, or at least no using both
to re-flip twice (having both so that you have options
when facing Ability or Item denial is legit). The coin
flips have to be a direct part of the attack; for
example if the Pokémon with Trick Coin is
Confused, the check to see whether or not the attack
works properly or if it merely places three damage
counters on the attacking Pokémon cannot be affected by
Trick Coin.
Just like with Victini, there is no guarantee you
will flip better or that you won’t do just as well
without the re-flip and thus could have used a different
Pokémon Tool. One also needs to remember that even when
using attacks with static damage, the effective average
is what ultimately matters. An attack might have a
“120” printed beside it with no effect text, but even
disregarding the difficulties of meeting its Energy
requirements, overkill damage usually doesn’t matter.
You may “inflict” 120 damage, but the Defending Pokémon
only “receives” up to as much as its HP. This is why
the attacks on both M Charizard-EX ended up being
disappointing: besides the Energy costs and drawbacks
involved, a situation where you would need that full 300
points of damage in competitive play would be viewed as
a fluke. Relevant to Trick Coin usage, sometimes
you’re going to flip far better than you needed but that
won’t offset the times when you do still flip poorly
because the extra damage is wasted.
So is Trick Coin a bad card? No, but like most
of this week it is quite specialized. It has the same
risk as all Pokémon Tools but as you’re using it with
attacks, you have a chance to benefit before it can be
discarded and/or to play it before Items or Pokémon
Tools can be blocked by other card effects and obviously
you use it to the exclusion of other Pokémon Tools.
This gives you a fallback option if you’re already
running Victini but are worried about Garbodor
(BW: Dragons Exalted
54/124; BW: Plasma Freeze 119/116; BW:
Legendary Treasures 68/113), or lets you run your
own Garbodor if Garbotoxin is a more valuable
Ability to your deck than Victory Star. Seismitoad-EX
has made Item lock fairly common, and it isn’t even the
only such threat, so I’m starting to warm to what I
would have initially dismissed as the redundant pairing
of Victini and Trick Coin, so instead we
get to the final hurdle: what coin flip reliant attack
is worth building a deck around? That I am
unfortunately not sure of: I’ve seen some nice fun decks
(or horribly sadistic fun decks if you’re on the
receiving end) but they aren’t the kind of things you
should take to a competitive event unless you’re
desperate (“luck” is the only real shot you have for
winning).
I am struggling to come up with examples for Standard;
we’ll have to settle for Malamar-EX (XY:
Phantom Forces 58/119, 115/119) and its MAXamar
attack that gives you a coin flip for each Energy
attached, with each “heads” result worth 60 points of
damage. Hardly great, but for whatever reason I’m
drawing a blank here., For Expanded Victini (BW:
Noble Victories 43/101) is a glass cannon for the
luck (and even has an old review
here)
that does 120 for [P] and is small enough for Level
Ball to search out; the “only” catch is that you
need to flip two coins and have both be “heads”. Gothitelle
(BW: Dragons Exalted 57/124) is a card we never
reviewed before, probably because it is a 130 HP Stage 2
Pokémon without an Ability that was released back when
Pokémon Catcher didn’t need a coin flip but after
Rare Candy stopped working the same turn you
played a Basic. Like Victini it also needs to
get two “heads” on a double coin toss, but its attack
requires [PC] and scores an automatic KO. You know, not
that Dimension Valley is out so you could perform
that attack for just [P], that isn’t quite as desperate
as it used to be… but again I’m drawing a blank for
Standard. In Limited play, as long as something in your
deck has an attack that can benefit from it, you’ll
probably have the space even if it is just improving
your odds of inflicting a Special Condition or scoring
+20 damage.
Ratings
Standard:
2.5/5 - Composite score; in a lot of decks this card is
useless or close to it because they have no coin flip
reliant attacks (or at least no important ones), but
when you find the right attack, that extra chance at
getting the preferred result is pretty clutch. Both
competing against and complimenting Victini with
Victory Star, in such decks its value rises to near
staple status, but the end result of the two extremes is
that it scores below average.
Expanded:
3/5 - Even if V-Blast Victini and Doom Decree
Gothitelle are only good for a “joke” deck, having
some concrete examples is enough for me to jump the
score a quarter point over Standard, but the situation
is indeed the same: this is a composite score again
because most of the time this card is of no use, but
where it does fit in its marvelous.
Limited:
3.5/5 - No surprise that this is once again a composite
score; the difference is that here, it is hard to build
a deck without including a few Pokémon with coin flips
in their attacks, so even if the combo isn’t amazing its
actually functional (unlike in constructed formats) for
general usage. If there were more “big reward” options
in this set - all I noticed for coin-flip based attacks
was Malamar-EX - then it could have scored even
higher.
Summary:
Trick Coin is our fourth card this week with a
specific niche use, with competition in that niche.
Fortunately it’s only one other card of competition and
both have separate counters, so even though Victini
and its Victory Star Ability don’t stack with Trick
Coin, they help to cover your back. At least if
you’re daring or foolish or apathetic enough to run a
deck heavily reliant upon coin flips. Don’t use it for
tournaments unless you’re desperate and
comfortable winning on coin flips, but go ahead and have
some fun with flips when you’re playing with friends or
at League.
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