aroramage |
Oh my goodness gracious no.
Look, I know what you're thinking.
Greedy Dice can get you another Prize! Can you imagine
how amazing that would be? All you have to do is flip a
coin! That's so easy, you've no idea how powerful this
card can be! And I'll admit, the potential for this card
to just cheese your way to victory and cause your
opponents to flip tables in outrage cause you managed to
get the heads you needed to grab your last Prize, thus
pulling off the greatest upset in history.
The reality of it - this is a dead
card. A very dead card.
Look, out of 60 cards in your deck,
at most Greedy Dice is going to played at 4 copies. Of
those 60 cards, 6 get to be Prizes, so let's have some
fun with *PROBABILITIES!!*
So when you first start off a game,
you've got your 60 cards, 4 of which at most are Greedy
Dice. You start by drawing 7 cards for your starting
hand, meaning that each of your Greedy Dice has a strong
possibility of ending up in your opening hand. Assuming
they all stay in your deck though (somehow), that's 4
Greedy Dice left out of 53 cards in your deck. After
setting up, you get to put 6 more cards down as Prizes.
Assuming you didn't draw a Greedy Dice into your opening
hand, your first Greedy Dice has a 1/53 chance of
getting sent to your Prizes - in total, you've got a
4/53 chance of getting any of your Greedy Dice into your
Prizes.
What does that mean? That's about a
7.5% chance of getting 1 Greedy Dice as your first Prize
card. That's about the same odds of you getting any Ace
in a regular deck of playing cards without the Jokers,
with your second Prize having the exact same odds,
assuming you don't have your first Prize as a Greedy
Dice and all 4 are still in your deck.
Now what are the chances of all 4
Greedy Dice ending up in your Prizes? Simple! Assuming
they don't end up in your starting hand, the best
possible chance of your 4 Greedy Dice all ending up as
Prizes is about:
4/53 - 7.5%
4/52 - 7.7%
4/51 - 7.8%
3/50 - 6%
2/49 - 4%
1/48 - 2%
=~0.00000232%
How astronomically unlikely is
that? Let's just say you've got a higher chance of
getting killed by fireworks in your lifetime than you do
of getting all 4 of those Greedy Dice in your Prizes.
So hey, if you pull that
off...well...don't use fireworks to celebrate.
Rating
Standard: 1/5 (running 4 is a huge
waste of deck space though for what is both a cheesy and
a extremely lucky play)
Expanded: 1/5 (and running any less
will only decrease the odds of this card ending up in
your Prizes, meaning the chance for you to pull off that
big upset gets slimmer and slimmer)
Limited: 1.5/5 (I really can only
give the half point more because there are less cards in
the deck, which does increase the likelihood of Greedy
Dice ending up IN the Prizes, but at the same time
you've only got 4 chances for it to show up rather than
6)
Arora Notealus: Greedy Dice
exemplifies the pure essence of randomness in the card
game in the most structured way you can think of.
Really, they should've just left it at, "Hey you drew
this card as a Prize? Go ahead and take another!" and
then it would've definitely seen some play for those
donk maneuvers. But with the additional probabilities of
the coin flip affecting how often Greedy Dice even
works, how can you possibly recommend it?
...I mean, unless it's some sort of
crazy luck deck you're building, but at that point,
well, you're not playing competitive.
Next Time: BREAK into a new pride!
|
Otaku |
Today we look at
Greedy Dice (XY: Steam Siege 102/114).
This card is an Item but that might not mean as much as
it usually does because of its text which reads
You can play this card only if you took it as a face-down Prize
card, before you put it into your hand. Flip a coin. If
heads, take 1 more Prize card.
So you can never
play this card from hand. Ever. So being
able to search it out with Korrina or Skyla
or other Item based support is all but meaningless,
though there is a noteworthy upside: whether or not your
opponent has Items locked down by attack effect or
Ability, those all prevent you from playing Items from
hand, and this won’t be “from hand”. Of course,
getting to take an extra Prize is fantastic, and the way
this card works should you hit another Greedy Dice
you could activate it as well. However, I’m going
to explain to you know how this card fails on almost
every level, and the terrifying things is we have
hope it remains a “bad” card because with a combo
from shortly before the Expanded Cut Off, it could be
broken. Well, or at least cheap even if it
might not win you a tournament.
So, the good
about the card is mostly about personal taste. The
color green is associated with greed in western culture,
and green happens to be my favorite color. Also I
am quite fond of rolling dice, just in general and
specifically because I enjoy tabletop, pen & paper
role-playing games. Stuff like Dungeons &
Dragons, though I only kind of like that particular
system and instead prefer GURPS (and a few others) over
it. Hm… hopefully I haven’t used any of this stuff
for security questions. Now, this is pretty
superficial stuff, the card’s aesthetic/theme; even here
though there are problems. “Dice” is usually the plural
form of the word, with “die” being singular.
Technically though it is also correct to use “dice” for
a single die, but it feels like a dumbing down of the
language to me (whether or not it is as I don’t know the
word history). The card effect actually uses a
coin though; of course Pokémon technically only uses
coins and not dice, allowing you to substitute dice for
coins when an effect needs a randomizer. I would
prefer they move away from this but my understanding is
that it is a cultural thing. Pity as this then
directly pertains to the card’s effect: instead of
having up to six options (or more if we actually used
dice instead of one die), it’s a binary choice: half the
time we get one effect, half the time we get another.
Still they could have used a double coin flip and added
a third effect (and then two dice for the art so the
name was a bit better).
Then again, we
don’t want this card to be better because this is
the kind of variance that really is almost pure luck.
Yes, it does require skill to build an otherwise
competitive deck with four slots dedicated to an Item
that is a dead card if it isn’t in your Prizes, and
which is a “tails fails” card even when you do take it
as a facedown Prize. Even if it is both in your
Prizes and you would flip “heads”, it can be a waste; it
won’t matter if you never take that Prize, or if you
take it but as part of your winning KO. Yet the
developer’s are tempting fate by creating such a
thing in the first place. It actually isn’t
impossible that we could get to a point where Greedy
Dice becomes a “win more” card. Someone
creates a solid deck list that has four open slots and
it turns out the best investment is a “win more” card
that gives you a slight chance at an extra Prize.
Improbable, but possible. Highly improbable is
someone basically stealing a win because they run four
copies of Greedy Dice, all four are Prized, they
score a KO and not only reveal their first copy of
Greedy Dice, but flip “heads”, get the second copy,
flip “heads” again, get the third copy, etc. until
they’ve taken four extra Prizes. It doesn’t take
someone doing this at a tournament and winning the
entire thing for a “lucky win” to matter to everyone;
you never know how a tournament would have turned out,
and sometimes that person who is eliminated due to such
luck that would have won otherwise, could have gone on
to be a key opponent whom you would have defeated, or
would have defeated and eliminated the person from the
tournament who would have gone on to defeat you.
We aren’t that far
removed from a deck that could break this card, either.
Obviously fast, aggressive decks are a “thing” and have
been almost the entire life of the TCG. What we
need to break this card is simply an aggressive deck
that can manipulate what is in its face down Prize
cards. Not only is this a plausible idea for a
future card, one that actually could be a welcome
addition to the cardpool if not for Greedy Dice,
but I can name you a combo that can do exactly
that with one card that is both Standard and Expanded
legal, and the other two cards that miss being Expanded
legal by only a few sets. Swampert (XY:
Primal Clash 36/160) has the Ability “Diving Search”
which allows you to search your deck for a card, set it
aside, shuffle your deck, then put that card on top. Rotom
(HS: Undaunted 20/90) released back in August of
2010; Black & White (the oldest set in Expanded)
is the third set after it. This card has a Poké-Power
(like an Ability but treated as distinct by other card
effects) which allows you to switch the top card of your
deck with one of your facedown Prize cards. Next
is Alph Lithograph (HS: Triumphant FOUR),
an odd secret rare and possibly the only example of
Trainer cards with the same name but different effects
(that isn’t an example of text revision or errata).
This version of Alph Lithograph allows you to
look at your facedown Prize cards, then returns them to
that position.
Okay, this still
probably doesn’t seem broken; you’ve got a Stage 2 Water
Type, and even if the other two were suddenly reprinted
that’s still a small, Bench-sitting Basic that (as its
Poké-Power would have to be updated into an Ability)
could get blocked by some common effects, and an Item
card which also gets blocked by several common
effects. You also still need to flip “heads”.
Aren’t I being paranoid? Yes, a little. This
card goes back to being almost safely “bad” even in my
doomsday scenario if we have a card effect that forces
your opponent’s Prize cards faceup. We’ve seen a
card like that before in the form of Here Comes Team
Rocket!, a card that forces both player’s
Prizes faceup. Of course, it would only be good
now if you had circumstances like this long
hypothetical. The thing is the Pokémon TCG has a
history, reprinting cards that were obviously broken (Exhibit A),
releasing cards with effects they thought were harmless
but weren’t (Exhibit B),
and re-releasing new cards inspired by or directly
copying an older effect (Exhibit C).
Some of my evidence even could be used in more than one
category. That does not fill me with
confidence that we won’t see an effect which allows you
to reflip or even dictate coin flip results, as an
example of the final piece for this hypothetical broken
combo that would then just need a stripped down speedy
beatdown deck (assuming Swampert wasn’t strong
enough itself to do the job).
Ratings
Standard:
1.5/5
Expanded:
1.25/5
Limited:
1.75/5
Summary:
If I still seem purely paranoid, remember this card
didn’t have to exist. Greedy Dice is a
completely unnecessary risk to game balance. If it
is bad it remains filler and if it is good it is too
good. This is an actual card that only has the
effect of taking an extra Prize if you’re lucky!
In Limited you will almost always have a better card to
run instead, but you honestly might not! Even
without my bizarre hypothetical combos and decks, we
just need a much blander card pool and this becomes a
legitimate card to play. I consider it a bad thing
when I win or lose by a coin flip in a TCG.
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