aroramage |
...oh.
It's uh...it's this thing again.
Turn your Prize cards face-up.
I mean...it's not bad. Technically.
Honestly, knowing what's in your Prize zone can be very
useful information, since it's telling you what you're
not gonna be able to search for in your deck. At the
same time, though, that information's public knowledge,
meaning your opponent then knows what's not available to
you so long as they prevent the KO. Now depending on
what actually ends up in the Prizes, there may not even
be anything they can do about it, but still, why would
you want them knowing that?
Not to mention if you know your
deck well enough, a simple Skyla or Ultra Ball or even
stuff like Battle Compressor will pretty much tell you
everything you need to know.
I've just saved you the need to use
a slot on this card.
Rating
Standard: 1/5 (really in the grand
scheme of things, knowing what's in your Prizes is good,
but there's no need to use an entire slot for it)
Expanded: 1/5 (this was WHAT number
on the Boundaries Crossed Top 10 list?!)
Limited: 2/5 (...eh, it's a short
enough format to maybe know something?)
Arora Notealus: It's weird how what
in the video games is one of the most essential items in
the game turns out to be one of the worst Trainer cards
you could have in the TCG. There are just so many better
cards that do better things, it's almost like Town Map
got printed out just to say they did it. I mean let's
face it, Town Maps have been around since the good ol'
Gen I days when you "borrowed" it from your rival's
sister, and yet it wasn't until Boundaries Crossed -
nearly 15 years later, mind you!! - when they gave it a
card. Maybe if there were some other cards that could
interact with Prizes in a way that wasn't just "looking"
at them...
Next Time:...yeah, I'm not hiding
this, IT'S SKYLA :D
|
Otaku |
Our penultimate subject for the week is Town Map
(BW: Boundaries Crossed 136/149; XY:
BREAKthrough 150/162), yet another Trainer receiving
a reprint. It was first reviewed three years ago
as our
eighth place pick
for BW: Boundaries Crossed. It is an Item,
so all the benefits of being a Trainer (mostly some
solid search options) and the pros and cons of being an
Item (which boil down to a little more support versus
good-to-great locking effects). Its effect flips
your Prizes face up; you know exactly what is where but
so does your opponent. Less relevant than in the
first review, if something specifies it affects a
facedown Prize, it won’t work on one you’ve permanently
flipped up. The real big drawback is that there is
nothing else to the effect so once you use a single
copy, any others are dead cards in hand.
Interestingly, if it ends up stuck in your Prizes
itself, it still served a purpose as it kept one other
card out of there. Normally that goes without
saying, but given the purpose of Town Map, it
becomes a decent trade off.
Town Map
showed some promise and for the most part has lived up
to just that. It is one of the many cards that
most players would love to run if only they had room and
a good way of getting a lone copy into hand (because you
don’t want to run more than one). Certain decks
are majorly enhanced by it and they are two sides of the
same coin: the decks that need certain cards
available whether they are blazingly fast or
(relatively) slow set-ups. For the most part that
means certain combo decks (no good, contemporary
examples spring to mind) and certain highly aggressive
decks, of which a few great examples come to mind: Night
March, Vespiquen (XY: Ancient Origins
10/98) and Flareon (BW: Plasma Freeze
12/116) decks, which I’ve seen mixed and matched though
last I checked Night March tended to be its own thing in
Expanded while Vespiquen and Flareon
[Plasma] were a tag team act. These decks tend to
run incredibly tight builds where it can be dangerous
even for something they run maxed out in a four count
(like Double Colorless Energy) to have a single
copy locked away in the Prizes. With their
Shaymin-EX (XY: Roaring Skies 77/108,
106/108) enhanced Trainer engines that rip through your
own deck in a turn or two while focusing on OHKOs with
single Prize attackers, pulling off a Town Map
isn’t a necessity it but is very, very valuable.
Unless it tips off your opponent that they just need to
endure a bit because too many key cards are Prized so if
they avoid giving up any KOs, the deck will eventually
sputter out. Expanded never lost this card but yet
again Standard welcomes it back. For Limited play
as usual the relative emptiness of your deck means that
it will prove valuable, even if you don’t have anything
especially potent or unique to worry about getting stuck
in your Prizes, which are only four cards versus six.
Then again with draw/search so low in most Limited decks
(you’re using the best of what you pulled, which may not
be all that great) sometimes just knowing that
“Yes, I can count on getting a Basic Energy card off of
my Prize instead of hoping I top deck it.” is pretty
important. Actually, that scenario can even apply
to Standard and Expanded; the getting a
not-particularly-hard-to-search card, not using stuff
you through together from six boosters. At least I
hope that is not how you build your decks outside of
Limited play.
Ratings
Standard:
3.25/5
Expanded:
3.25/5
Limited:
5/5
Summary:
Town Map does one thing and it does it fairly
well. In a slightly different format it might not
be worth it at all or it could be a staple, so it is not
a card to forget about. It might be nice if it had
a secondary or alternate effect so that multiples
weren’t a waste (apart from increasing the odds of using
it quickly and reliably), but in general it is always
useful, but only the optimal play in certain decks.
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