aroramage |
Welcome back to today's card of the day! This time we
go back to Gen IV to take a look at the unusualness that
is Magmar's evolution, Magmortar! I always kind of
thought of Magmortar's design being a bit goofy, what
with the big lips and the cannons-for-arms thing, but
today he's turned into an interesting card! Let's take a
look!
Now even though technically in the video games Magmortar
is a Stage 2 Pokemon (Magmar's been the Stage 1 since
Magby came out in Gen II), here in the TCG he's
considered Stage 1 as Magmar is the Basic (and I guess
there's no Magby around...Baby Pokemon in the TCG are
weird). For a Stage 1, he's not too shabby with 120 HP
and a nice couple of attacks. Flame Charge is pretty
good cheap acceleration, hitting for 30 and giving
Magmortar a Fire Energy straight from the deck all at
the cost of 1. Combine that with any Energy you may have
attached to Magmar before evolving it, and you could
have 3 Energy by Turn 2 for Magmortar!
And then there's his second attack: Twin Bursts. This
attack costs 4 Energy, so the earliest you'd be using it
is Turn 3 with just Magmortar's acceleration (or Turn 2
with stuff like Blacksmith getting played), and it only
deals 80 damage. Now here's the kicker: it gets an extra
80 damage if Electivire is on your Bench.
...wait, what?
In other words, to really get the benefits out of
Magmortar, you also need to be playing Electivire. Now
80-for-4 isn't that great, but doubling that to 160 just
for having another card on your Bench? That's not a bad
trade-off, and it's encouraging an interesting blend of
elements and strategy! The only trouble at that point is
maintaining both parties and getting them into play, and
with stuff like Evosoda, that's not as hard as you'd
think.
I can imagine Magmortar-Electivire decks popping up more
so in casual Expanded play, since there you can take
advantage of Blacksmith and Eelektrik (NVI) to charge up
Magmortar fast or Electivire hard. You'll also probably
want to focus more on Magmortar, as Electivire's Tag
Team Spark only does more damage based on the number of
Magmortar in play - so Magmortar's gonna be the
offensive force most of the time. And hey, hitting for
160 just means it's a Muscle Band or Hypnotoxic Laser
away from a KO on an EX!
Magmortar's an interesting card with an interesting
attack that shows promise, but even being a Stage 1
won't let him catch up to the pace of some of the more
powerful decks roaming around. Still, he can deal like
Tyrantrum does and work an interesting angle for massive
damage, but he requires a deck built around him and
Electivire. Never mind that he won't be able to take
advantage of the wonderful Special Energies floating
around (wonder why they didn't make a Special Fire
Energy for Flashfire...). He's not bad, but he may ask
too much to be good.
Rating
Standard: 2.5/5 (not too shabby, but the requirements
for a high damage output require their own deck)
Expanded: 3/5 (a little better with more support here,
though it is also Stage 1 support that's better off in a
Rayquaza-EX deck)
Limited: 3.5/5 (running two Stage 1 cards that need each
other may seem tricky, but if you can get them out,
Magmortar can wreck stuck like Heracross-EX; just keep
him away from Seismitoad-EX)
Arora Notealus: I wonder how it is that Magmortar and
Electivire decided to team up in the first place. Maybe
they realized they were Gen IV evos of Gen I
version-exclusive Pokemon found in specific areas of
Kanto only and decided that that was a good basis for a
tag-team. Or maybe they ran into each other at the
Training Center, who knows.
Next Time: What do you call a parrot's anger?
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Otaku |
Our second card this week is Magmortar (XY: Furious Fists
11/111). It enjoys being a Fire-Type; Blacksmith
and company are no longer the “new” thing, but the
support is great. Fire Weakness is still seeing play on
potent and popular cards like Virizion-EX and
Genesect-EX and… well mostly those two for the
competitive scene. Fire Resistance doesn’t exist unless
we go back to the Unlimited card pool, so the Fire-Type
really is quite good. Being a Stage 1 Pokémon? Not so
much; taking twice the space of a non-Evolving Basic
Pokémon plus an extra turn to Evolve, in a format
dominated by Basic Pokémon is not a recipe for success.
Still it isn’t too bad, and when you run into a
Pyroar (XY: Flashfire 20/106) you can rest
easy knowing Intimidating Mane means nothing to
Magmortar.
I am trying to fine tune my terminology again, even though I
currently am not using any “headings” like I once did.
As I can think of nothing better, I will once again
refer to all aspects of a card other than Attacks and
Abilities (or Pokémon Powers or Poké-Bodies or Poké-Powers
etc. with older cards) as “Attributes”. I stopped using
that term and instead used “Stats” which… really never
made much sense no matter how I defined it, but when I
started using it I was still reviewing cards for the
Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game and needed a term that
wasn’t in use elsewhere for either game. Now that its
back down to just Pokémon, I can go back to Attributes
until I find a better one.
120 HP feels a bit small for a Stage 1, though that might be
because the competition is so high; with competitive
Pokémon-EX usually sporting 170 or 180 and decks trying
to OHKO them, even the bigger Stage 1 and 2 Pokémon
don’t actually feel that big. At least it is enough to
not be a probably or especially easy OHKO; plenty of
decks can one shot Magmortar, but at least
they’ll usually need to put some effort into it. Mind
the Water Weakness though; the popularity of Landorus-EX
coupled with those still concerned about Pyroar
means there are more than a few Water-Types being
splashed into decks (pun intended). Beartic (XY:
Furious Fists 22/111) is already seeing play to help
with those two, and will score a stone cold OHKO (...I
really like puns!) exploiting the chunky three Energy
Retreat Cost on Magmortar… which I’ll cover now
since this is such a natural bridge to it.
A cost of three is hard to pay and even when have the Energy
available, will often set you back too far to make it
worthwhile; most decks already want a means of reducing
or bypassing the cost of retreating, and a Magmortar
deck has added incentive. As a quick note, this becomes
a slight positive in Expanded; while retreating isn’t
going to be any easier there, the cost is high enough
that Heavy ball can target Magmortar.
Taking a step back (I wasn’t even trying for that one),
the lack of Resistance won’t make a huge difference in
terms of soaking damage, but would be unusual based on
the Typing; to avoid clashing (as many TCG Types contain
multiple video game Types), the choices would have to be
Fairy, Grass or Metal Resistance, none of which exist in
Standard or Expanded.
Magmortar has two attacks,
Flame Charge and Twin Bursts. The former requires only
[R] and does 30 points of damage while allowing you to
search your deck for a [R] Energy and attach it to
Magmortar: it doesn’t specify “basic” Energy but
none that exist count as [R] while in the deck. This
isn’t a bad attack, but because Magmortar is a
Stage 1 Pokémon with 120 HP, it isn’t as good as it
might look at first; odds of surviving long enough to
make use of the attached Energy are low, though having
an inexpensive attack is still a useful option. Twin
Bursts, the second attack, requires a massive [RRCC] and
only does 80 points of base damage, however the
effect text states that if you have an Electivire
on your Bench, the damage becomes 160 (technically 80 +
80 should we ever get a card that cares about such a
distinction). 80 for four is too low, but 160 is pretty
good; you’re just another 10 or 20 points away from
OHKOing all but Mega Evolutions, Wailord (BW:
Dragons Exalted 26/124) if it was being played or of
course Pokémon with certain protective effects or
massively boosted HP scores.
Magmortar must Evolve from
a Magmar unless you’re going with some of the
crazy older cards from Unlimited. For Standard, your
only option is set-mate Magmar (XY: Furious
Fists 10/111), an 80 HP Fire-Type Basic that is
Water Weak, lacks any Resistance, has a Retreat Cost of
[CC] and two attacks. The first does 10 points of
damage for [R] while the second does 30 for [RC] and
requires you discard a [R] Energy. In short, not very
good. In Expanded, you also could use BW: Dragons
Exalted 20/124; it has the same Attributes as the
other but with different attacks, which seem slightly
better as it can do 10 for [C] (which shouldn’t almost
never matter) or 50 for [RRC]... which also should
rarely matter but still seems better than 30 for [RC]
with a required discard. According to Bulbapedia Japan
has a version we lacked (from one of those
“introductory” subsets, Everyone’s Exciting Battle)
we lack that would otherwise be legal for both
formats, but it is a worse card; same everything else
but with 10 less with a single attack that does
40 for [RRC]. If we ever get it… ignore it. Use what
you have to for Standard, go with BW: Dragons Exalted
20/124.
In Expanded, there is also an older Magmortar to consider,
XY: Dragons Exalted 21/124. It has the same
Attributes as today’s version and also has two attacks.
The first (Flame Screen) requires [R] and hits for 40
while applying an effect to Magmortar that
reduces the damage it would take from attacks until the
end of the next turn by 20 after Weakness and
Resistance. The effect is on Magmortar, so your
opponent can’t get around it simply by changing out his
or her own attacker (changing out your Defending Pokémon
works fine, though). Much like Flame Charge this isn’t
bad but it isn’t quite “good”. If your opponent can’t
bypass the effect, his or her Pokémon will now need to
net an effective 140 points of damage for a OHKO; a
small improvement over 120 but not insignificant. That
isn’t a huge hurdle and on the offensive side, 40 isn’t
enough to set-up for a 2HKO without changing out
attackers or boosting both Flame Charge and this card’s
second attack, Flame Thrower. Flame Thrower requires
(RCC), plus the discard of an Energy attached to
Magmortar for a slightly underpowered 90 points of
damage. Still that is enough for a 2HKO.
Recent card releases (plus the not so recent change to the first
turn rules and errata to Pokémon Catcher) have
made this older Magmortar a bit better than it
used to be (you can see the original review
here)
but not to the point it is really worth running in
addition to or instead of today’s version. Once again
Japan has a version we don’t yet, and once again if we
do get an outside-of-Japan release for Everyone’s
Exciting Battle it wouldn’t be worth playing as it
has only 100 HP (and otherwise identical Attributes)
with two weaker attackers: 20 for [R] (no additional
effects) or 100 for [RRC] and requiring you discard two
Energy attached to Magmortar as well.
After all of that, we aren’t done yet. Magby… doesn’t exist
in a Standard or Expanded legal form yet. The problem
with this is it was one of the original “baby” Pokémon
and by now, the game really should take advantage of
having card rotation and the gap between iterations of
cards to just upgrade Magby into a regular Basic
Pokémon so that Magmar can be a Stage 1 (okay,
probably won’t help it much) while Magmortar
could be Stage 2 Pokémon (which might help it out as the
designers tend to give Stage 2 Pokémon better
Attributes, Abilities and/or Attacks than Stage 1
Pokémon, at least sometimes). Of course in the video
games, I don’t think the older “baby” Pokémon have been
mainlined yet either in the name of backwards
compatibility, either: mores the pity. Perhaps we’ll
get a Magby that can at least “fake” Evolving
again, and this time the designers can realize that the
next Magmar and Magmortar should still be
a Stage 1 and 2 respectively (the Magby is there
just for backwards compatibility, and from that point on
future Magby won’t need such a clause). Wishful
thinking I am afraid.
Then there is Electivire; we will likely review the latest
version (XY: Furious Fists 30/111) soon enough,
but the short version is that it doesn’t seem bad but
neither does it seem overly good, and its place in a
Magmortar deck will be to exploit Lightning Weakness
while serving as a trigger for Twin Bursts. Skip the
older version (BW: Boundaries Crossed 54/149)
because simply put, it isn’t any good. The
Electabuzz that correspond with those two are
similarly; both should only be played to Evolve the
older one is clearly inferior… and Elekid is in
the same boat as Magby. There are even
Everyone’s Exciting Battle counterparts for
Electivire and Electabuzz as well.
So with all of that out of the way, is Magmortar? I believe
so, however I do not believe it will become a major
deck. In Standard, the combo is strong enough to win
games, but not reliable enough (especially compared to
the competition) to win many tournaments. Running two
Stage 2 Pokémon eats up a lot of deck space, and the
loss of Level Ball has proven very hard on
Evolutions (which enjoyed it as an easy way to get out
most Evolving Basic Pokémon). Thanks to Double
Colorless Energy and Blacksmith, you can take
a Magmortar from zero to ready-to-Twin-Burst in a
single turn. It can be difficult getting all of the
pieces set-up multiple times, but if you’re sticking to
all or mostly non-Pokémon-EX attackers, your opponent
has to take six Prizes via six KOs, while you might be
able to do it with as few as three.
In Expanded, Magmortar might actually be better; it gains
access to Level Ball (for Magmar), a
better Magmar (though the difference will rarely
matter), Heavy Ball (though you may need to stick
with Ultra Ball instead for the discards) and
that may be enough to stabilize the deck’s set-up,
perhaps even make running one more thing in the deck,
like Jirachi-EX or Electrode (BW:
Plasma Freeze 33/116) to improve set-up even at the
cost of a precious Bench slot, in turn making it less
painful to use Blacksmith. For Limited,
Magmortar is a good pull. You might be using
Magmar anyway as a decent biggish Basic attacker if
you can afford to run some Fire Energy;
Magmortar likely won’t have an Electivire to
combo with but thanks to the greater difficulty of
getting as large of Pokémon into play and getting them
attacking as quickly, its Attributes and Attacks are
much more effective here.
Ratings
Standard: 3/5 - On the
border of being a lesser played but competitive deck and
(assuming the player-base cooperates) slightly
competitive but often played “fun” deck.
Expanded: 3.25/5 - I think
the addition of some older cards like Level Ball
just tips this over into “lesser played but competitive”
deck status.
Limited: 3.75/5 - Even without its partner Electivire (and thus full
access to its offensive might), the rest of what
Magmortar brings is plenty for this format.
Summary: While I worry that this is further proof the format is never going
to have a chance to slow down to the pace I would
prefer, Magmortar is a solid addition to the card
pool; I don’t expect it to become the next big thing,
but I do expect at least some players to use it even in
tournament settings, and with enough success you should
familiarize yourself with it and maybe even give it a
try both for the sake of knowing how it works and for
some fun.
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