aroramage |
Behold the master of rocks, the
mightiest of the rhino-iest, the beast from the eastern
part of the mountains, it's Rhyperior!! OH MAN, AND HE'S
GOT AN ANCIENT TRAIT AND AN ABILITY, THIS MUST BE GOOD!!
Rhyperior here has the Omega
Barrier Trait, which we've looked at a few times before.
This is good, cause it means your opponent can't tag
Rhyperior with any Trainer cards. So that prevents them
from messing around with Rhyperior's Hammer Arm, that
hefty 4-for-100 attack that takes off the top card of
their deck. It's a bit too hefty though, but hey, that
damage'll go up with all that Fighting support! And on
top of that, Rhyperior - heck, ALL of your Pokemon take
less damage thanks to the power of Rock Wall! How much
you ask?
10.
...oh, and that'd be AFTER Weakness
and Resistance.
I suppose that's okay for attacks
on your Bench - it'll keep Primal Kyogre-EX from OHKOing
SOME of your guys, but for the Active Slot? When you've
got a lot of things in the format running around that
help tack on damage in increments of 10-20, reducing it
only by 10 is...abysmal. I'll give Rhyperior some credit
though, he does have 160 HP which is higher than a lot
of Stage 2s, but that doesn't mean it'll save him for
more than two turns.
Never mind all the investment he
takes, he's just not good enough for competitive play.
Stick to casual with this guy at best.
Rating
Standard: 2/5 (he's got a lot going
for him, but he could be a LOT better for a Stage 2)
Expanded: 2/5 (about the same here)
Limited: 3.5/5 (given the overall
lower damage output of the format, shaving off 10 damage
from most attacks is pretty good, and dealing 100 in
kind isn't half-bad either)
Arora Notealus: Rhyperior always
struck me as an unusual Pokemon just from his
appearance, but he's still pretty good. He's a physical
powerhouse usually, so all things considered, this
emulates him pretty well. I wouldn't be surprised if,
should they finally decide to make evos appropriately
powerful again, Rhyperior was one of the ones leading
the charge.
Next Time: Your ship looks pretty
sturdy. Would be a shame if something took a bite out of
it.
|
Otaku |
Welcome to another week of XY: Primal Clash
reviews folks! As we continue to check some of the
stuff that didn’t catch our eye sooner to see if we
missed something good. We begin with Rhinox. I mean
Rhyperior (XY: Primal Clash 77/160). I know
what you’re thinking; no this wasn’t an excuse to make a
Transformers reference in my reviews (though I should
have thought of that sooner) but yes, this is a lame
opening joke.
Rhyperior
is a Fighting-Type, which is probably the best Type to
be right now; it has great indirect support, solid
direct support and three Types (Colorless, Darkness and
Lightning) are all either largely or mostly Weak to it.
There is the drawback that there is an
anti-Fighting-Type card or two but those aren’t seeing
competitive play and it is one of the more common forms
of Resistance you’ll encounter but “no Resistance” is
still far, far more common. What is an obvious, major
concern is that this is a Stage 2. Evolving into it
manually will be time consuming but Seismitoad-EX
is still plentiful enough that one doesn’t want to rely
heavily on Rare Candy. Exeggutor (XY:
Plasma Freeze 5/116) has made it a bit risky to try
to rely on just Maxie’s Hidden Ball Trick as
well, though its far less popular than Seismitoad-EX
variants. So the good news is you’ve got three options
but all three have blatant drawbacks.
Rhyperior
has 160 HP, the highest printed on a Stage 2 but sadly
still not guaranteed to survive a hit, even after we
take out decks that specialize in pseudo-OHKOs or OHKOs
via raw damage… but it is almost as good as it gets
before you jump up to Pokémon-EX. The Grass Weakness is
obviously a potential exploit for opposing decks, but
the main Grass-Type attackers seeing successful
competitive play are still Leafeon (BW: Plasma
Freeze 11/116), Genesect-EX and Virizion-EX.
I’m still digesting data from the State Championships
and while it was looking like VirGen was on its way out
then it looked like it might have been the smart play
and of course it can be fun when there isn’t an Age
Group included along with the data. My apologies for
lacking a firm answer. I didn’t include Exeggutor
in the list because I’m not sure how big of a deal
Weakness is when facing that deck. The lack of
Resistance is a disappointment, but the Lightning
Resistance we’ve gotten used to seems to have vanished
in the XY block. The Retreat Cost of four is massive
and you’ll either need a means of reducing it, bypassing
manually retreating or a way to block/heal the damage
while stuck Active. Fortunately for Rhyperior,
the first two have been and still are common to decks
while the last one… is already built into Rhyperior.
Rhyperior
has an Ancient Trait, an Ability and an attack. The
Ancient Trait is Ω Barrier, which protects Rhyperior
from the effects of an opponent’s Trainers done directly
to Rhyperior (excluding Stadiums and Tools). So
Lysandre can’t force a Rhyperior up from
the Bench, Hypnotoxic Laser can’t afflict it with
Special Conditions, Crushing Hammer can’t discard
attached Energy, Startling Megaphone can’t
discard its Pokémon Tools, etc. Escape Rope
can’t force Rhyperior out of the Active slot but
it can force it up into the Active position (unless of
course another Ω Barrier Pokémon is up front); being
promoted from the Bench is an indirect effect. The
Ability continues bolstering the cards defense: Rock
Wall soaks 10 damage done to your Pokémon by attacks
from an opponent’s Pokémon (after Weakness and
Resistance) and the wording means it does stack. A lone
Rock Wall is pretty minor, but puts it about on par with
Pokémon-EX that have 170 HP; while it is much harder to
get into there are effects that can either bypass or
shut off the Ability, Rhyperior is only worth a
single Prize and doesn’t have to concern itself
with the various anti-Pokémon-EX cards.
Which just leaves the attack: Hammer Arm has appeared
before and this version requires [FFCC], hits for 100
damage and discards the top card of your opponent’s
deck. 100 for four Energy isn’t flat out bad but its a
bit low in my opinion; seems like you really need to get
120 to 130 for four unless the effect is amazing,
and discarding a card from the top of your opponent’s
deck is not. The current format is strange; discarding
effects can be awesome or awful and it’s all about “how
much” and “when”. Several decks have cards they want
discarded or at least can easily handle being discarded,
some players run Lysandre’s Trump Card in almost
everything (like me, whether or not it is a good play)
and there are even some decks that want to discard but
pack a Lysandre’s Trump Card because they need
deck out/bad discard insurance. In fact, Stage 2 decks
in general strike me as wanting Lysandre’s Trump Card
because too often they will have to toss things like
crazy. The main thing to take away is that the attack
leaves the card slow on the offensive and not so great
even when it gets going; you can offset this with the
various Fighting-Type (and general) buffs but that will
be in lieu of other approaches you might want to take
(more on that later).
We still need to run through our options for Rhyhorn,
Rhydon and other Rhyperior. There isn’t
too much for this line, but at least there is enough for
you to have a choice (and not all from one set). For
Rhyhorn, the decision is between XY 60/146
and XY: Primal Clash 74/160. Both are Basic,
Fighting-Types with 80 HP, Grass Weakness, no
Resistance, a Retreat Cost of [CCC], no Abilities and no
Ancient Traits, so it will come down to the attacks. XY
60/146 has two; for [F] it can use Dig Out to do 10
damage and discard the top card of your deck, but if it
was a [F] Energy you then get to attach the Energy to
itself. Unfortunately, Strong Energy doesn’t
count as [F] Energy when not already attached to a
Fighting-Type. Its second attack is Horn Drill for
[FCC] and 40 damage. XY: Primal Clash 74/160 has
just one attack: for [FF] it can use Take Down to hit
for 40 to the opponent’s Active and 10 to itself… the
latter of which sadly won’t be stopped by Rock Wall
(should the appropriate Rhyperior be Benched)
because Rock Wall doesn’t stop self-damage. Still, as
Dig Out seems too likely to backfire in a competitive
build (which often run less than 20% basic Energy) and
it needs three to do 40, go with Primal Clash
74/160 so that if you’re stuck attacking, it might be
possible to power-up and get in a solid hit. Obviously
something that aided in set-up would have been
preferred.
Rhydon
nearly mimics what we saw with Rhyhorn: your
choices this time are XY 61/146 and XY: Primal
Clash 75/160 and they are both Stage 1 Fighting-Type
Pokémon with 100 HP, Grass Weakness, no Resistance, no
Abilities, no Ancient Traits but this time they both
have two attacks and XY 61/146 enjoys the
slightly superior Retreat Cost of [CCC] to the Retreat
Cost of [CCCC] that XY: Primal Clash 75/160
bears. The attacks on XY 61/146 are Horn Drill
for [FCC], doing 50 points of damage and Mad Mountain
for [FFCC], doing no damage but instead requiring two
coin flips with the attack doing nothing unless you get
double “heads”. If you do get that result, you mill
your opponent’s deck good for one card per damage
counter on Rhydon. It also got a review a year
ago
here.
XY: Primal Clash 75/160 has a bigger version of
the Take Down attack found on its set-mate, this time
requiring [FCC] to hit for 50 and still 10 to itself.
Its second attack is Horn Drill for [FFCC], which does
a flat 70 damage. The difference I mentioned in Retreat
Costs doesn’t really matter but I’ll still take XY
61/146 (unless testing proves otherwise) because while
the card really needs a good one or two Energy attack
instead, I’ll take 50 with no self damage over 50 with
10 self-damage for the same cost and 70 for four is so
overpriced I’ll take my chance with the crazy attack
that might somehow result in a lucky deck out - while it
will probably never work the opponent just seeing it
could work as a threat to throw off their usual tactics.
Thanks to there being a second Rhyperior this
set, we still have two of those to run through: XY
62/146 and XY: Primal Clash 76/160. Differences
between today’s version and these two (besides attacks)
are that XY 62/146 has 10 less HP and neither of
these have Abilities or Ancient Traits (no surprise
there). XY 62/146 was reviewed
here;
the review may a year old but still seems pretty
accurate. Rock Blast is nice in that its finally a low
Energy attack; for as little as [F] you can use it. It
also does something that has proven quite valuable for
attackers like Mewtwo-EX and Yveltal-EX:
it scales with the Energy used, though in this case only
with the Energy attached to Rhyperior and when we
pay attention to the full text we realize that its not
actually aping those two, but Malamar-EX (or
would be except Rhyperior predates Malamar-EX):
you get a coin flip to try for damage per [F] Energy
attached to Rhyperior. This “kind of” works for
Malamar-EX because it has a somewhat useful
Ability that triggers when Energy is attached to it,
does 60 per coin flip and while its attack needs [DC]
it counts all Energy attached to it whereas Rhyperior
needs less to start but only counts [F] Energy and does
50 per “heads”... besides the other obvious difference
of Basic Pokémon-EX versus Stage 2 non-Pokémon-EX plus
an attack that risks doing no damage risks wasting all
the damage buffs available to Fighting-Types (if the
attack did 10 plus 50 per heads then at least those
damage bonuses would always apply). Does the second
attack (Rock Wrecker) save it? For [FFCC] we get 130
damage, a solid foundation for buffs but sullied by the
attack text, which ignores both Weakness and Resistance
(never a good trade) and Rhyperior can’t
attack the next turn. Why this card was mistaken as
being good enough to warrant such restrictions while
Yveltal-EX (released in the same set) didn’t, we may
never know.
So what about XY: Primal Clash 76/160? Very
different effect text but overall a similar pattern.
Besides that 10 less HP, its first attack is Rock
Shower for [FFC]. The good news is that it can do some
sizable spread damage. The bad news is not only does
the Energy required make it slow but its coin flip based
with no guaranteed minimum damage (not that the buffs
would apply to any damage except against the opponent’s
Active). You flip three coins and do 20 points of
spread per “heads”. Obviously all “tails” is rubbish,
but a single “heads” is still pretty poor, double
“heads” is just “okay” and three “heads” is pretty good…
but for needing three “heads” it should be great.
To give you an idea, you could run Kyurem (BW:
Noble Victories 34/101; BW: Black Star Promos
BW44; BW: Legendary Treasures 43/113) and for the
Type-shifted price of [WWC] hit for a flat 30 damage to
each of your opponent’s Pokémon. If we ignore Stage and
Type and comparable card pool, the attacks actually line
up… but like I said we are basically ignoring the rest
of the game to make that work. The Kyurem in
question predates Mr. Mime (BW: Plasma Freeze
47/116) and Mountain Ring; we really need a less
expensive attack that spread damage counters. What
about the second attack, Stone Edge? [FFCC] for 80 (+40
on a coin flip), so another slow, overpriced or under
powered attack.
So if we are running today’s Rhyperior, it isn’t
getting any help from its other iterations. So should
you run this? Probably not; while it has some nice
stuff going for it, it doesn’t seem nice enough to win
you anything other than a small tournament, and that
assumes you’re skilled, the build is good and that at
least a little luck goes your way. If you can get three
or four of these into play, perhaps a Hard Charm
on Rhyperior, then you could potentially have a
decent tank deck. You’ll need either Strong Energy
or Fighting Stadium in play so that you can 2HKO
most things, and both (or else two Strong Energy)
when facing Mega Evolutions that aren’t Fighting Weak
and Wailord-EX means you’ll need even more of a
buff for the OHKO, but its feasible. The problem is in
getting out multiples of this card quickly… even
“relatively” quickly while stalling with other cards is
quite the challenge. After that, you have to deal with
Special Conditions (at least the ones that come from
Abilities or Attacks) as well as attacks that are more
effect based or that simply hit so hard there is no
amount of defensive buffs that can save you (well,
against a few Focus Sash, but only for one turn).
The main problem I see is that the kind of deck I’d use
to support this card is a bit too similar to how I’d run
a deck focused on or backed by either Primal Groudon-EX
or a Machamp (XY: Furious Fists 46/111,
XY: Black Star Promos XY13). If Machamp
didn’t exist, you might see someone trying to get a
Rhyperior or two onto the Bench via Maxie’s
Hidden Ball Trick but 20 extra damage is usually a
lot more valuable than reducing the damage you take by
10… even if (unlike Machamp) Rhyperior has
its Ω Barrier to help keep it on the Bench. Primal
Groudon-EX of course simply has enough HP to force
most decks to accept a 2HKO or even 3HKO of it, while it
should be scoring easy OHKOs or 2HKOs against almost
anything that lacks a protective effect… instead of
trying to survive two or three hits while mostly scoring
2HKOs. I think the card might have a better chance in
Expanded due to Heavy Ball; the entire Evolution
line would be a legal search target, though odds are
you’d still run some things that weren’t Heavy Ball
legal and want at least one other search option. There
is a temptation to build a deck around Rhydon (XY
61/146), but using its Mad Mountain attack via Shrine
of Memories or Celebi-EX (I’d go with the
former), slapping a Giant Cape or Focus Sash
on Rhyperior and just trying to time it right so
that you get a massive discard at a point when it will
really hurt your opponent… but as stated there are a lot
of decks that can deal with such a thing.
Rhyperior
is unsurprisingly most useful for Limited play. The
other Rhyperior in the set is best used in
Limited, and the two of them being in the same set gives
you a slightly elevated chance. The lower Stages are
also handy, and while the Energy costs will mean you
can’t just run it with anything, but does keep it open
to other Pokémon with at least half Colorless Energy
costs.
Ratings
Standard:
2.25/5
Expanded:
2.4/5
Limited:
4/5
Summary:
This card has a lot going for it right now, but I don’t
think it powers up quickly enough (without expensive
combos) to really make a go of it. Rhyperior is
quite sturdy for a Stage 2 but it is still a Stage 2 in
a format where the only Stages that seem less desirable
are Restored Pokémon and Stage 1 Pokémon that Evolve
from Restored Pokémon. Still if you want to try
tanking, this might be your best bet.
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