aroramage |
Ending our week is the ever
interesting always here to mess with your face Team
Skull Grunt! Even though it clearly shows two of them...
...please ignore my embarrassing
gang-slang from yesterday.
Team Skull Grunt is a Supporter,
naturally, with a couple of neat effects. The first is
that he looks at your opponent's hand...which on a
Supporter is extremely bad on its own. Like if Team
Skull Grunt's only effect had been to look at your
opponent's hand, it would never see play. No Supporter
would be worth that time, and it would be almost
befitting of Team Skull's role in the Sun & Moon games.
Luckily for us TCG folk, it has
another effect. You take a look at the opponent's hand,
and then you get to discard 2 Energy cards from it, or
all of them if it's less than 2. So now we go from an
effect you'd never want to run a Supporter on to an
effect that is REALLY worth your time as a potentially
spicy tech. See, Team Skull Grunt can now do two things:
disruption, in the form of tossing out Energies, and
information, telling you what the opponent's game
strategy is. Between the two, disruption is a bigger
part of that than the information, even with
information's uses. But chances are if you're running
the Team Skull Grunt, you're doing it for the
disruption, and that is a powerful thing.
Against decks like Greninja BREAK
and Volcanion-EX, this can be a powerful tool in getting
rid of your opponent's main offensive power - they can't
hit Giant Water Shuriken or Steam Up without discarding
Energy, and Team Skull Grunt can hit them where it
counts. On top of that, in the early game, the Grunt can
easily slow your opponent down by withdrawing crucial
Energies they may need for their own set-up, making them
a potent force.
On the other hand, putting Energy
into the discard pile does help a lot of decks out as
well. Stuff running Volcanion and Lurantis-GX will
appreciate the Energies they couldn't use being put into
the discard to then be cycled out onto their other team
members, and before the Grunt realizes their mistake,
they've already been overrun by a bunch of power-hungry
decks that trample right over their disruptive efforts.
Such is the nature of Team Skull?
Rating
Standard: 3/5 (so really I suppose
Team Skull Grunt is a neat tech that should be played
carefully)
Expanded: 2.5/5 (cause against the
right deck, they can be a powerful disruptive force)
Limited: 4/5 (but against the wrong
deck? that could just spell trouble)
Arora Notealus: Man, now I want a
Team Skull Grunt whose line is, "Lemme tell ya how to
spell trouble! S-K-U-L-L!!" Maybe one day we'll get that
snarky Team Grunt that does that with their team name.
"R-O-C-K-E-T!"
Weekend Thought: Any of these cards
from this week spell trouble for you? Some ideas you'd
wanna through around? Some decks you want to try? Or
have you relegated a lot of these cards to the confines
of the binder? More cards to review in this set, and
hopefully you enjoyed the first of our Throwback
Thursday segments!
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Otaku |
*ahem*
That’s right, today
we look at Team Skull Grunt (Sun & Moon
133/149, 149/149)! This brand new Supporter allows
you to take a look at your opponent’s hand, and if (if
present) discard two Energy cards from it. Please
note that it does say Energy cards; I don’t know
if the game even recognizes that Double Colorless
Energy has two units of Energy before it is
attached to a Pokémon, but if it does, Team Skull
Grunt only uses up one of its two Energy card
discards hitting it. So, what is it like for a new
Supporter right now? General Trainer helping
effects aren’t excessive, but there are some very good
examples like Trainers’ Mail. General
Trainer counters are rare and rarely used, also good for
Team Skull Grunt. Supporter cards are
incredibly important to decks but require a delicate
balance due to their once-per-turn nature; too many and
your hand is cluttered by a bunch of cards you won’t
actually be able to use that turn, while too few and you
whiff on often vital card effects. Since they
debuted, Supporters have been either one of or the
primary draw mechanic for decks. During the
BW-era, the competition was very stiff, but it has
gotten somewhat better thanks to more non-Supporter
based draw options as well as VS Seeker; the
former of course freeing up your Supporter for the turn,
while the latter increases the value of variety in your
Supporter options.
That doesn’t mean
the field is wide open, though; in Expanded play it is
more crowded than ever because the combo of Battle
Compressor and VS Seeker on top of various
Ability, Item, and sometimes even attack-based draw
effects means even some of the mediocre or extremely
niche Supporters have found their place, with a wide
assortment tempting for most decks. The Standard
Format cuts back on the competition, but lacks Battle
Compressor; it forces you to really consider whether
you have room for another TecH Supporter or if you would
be better off adding an extra copy of one you don’t
currently have maxed out. It isn’t just other
Supporters either; right now the game has a lot
of potent Pokémon, other Trainers, and even Energy that
are all fighting for the same deck slot. So can
Team Skull Grunt compete? Yes. It took
me a moment to see the possibilities when I first saw a
translation of the Japanese version, and even then I
really wanted some confirmation from either myself or
others using the card, but to paraphrase an English
expression, two Energy in the hand may be worth one on
the Active. Team Flare Grunt is probably the
most direct competition for Team Skull Grunt,
which seems oddly appropriate. You can take a
guaranteed shot at an Energy attached to your opponent’s
Active, or try your luck with his or her hand to hit two
instead of one.
Except
it isn’t quite that simple. Even if you find no
Energy there, you still get to see what your opponent
has in hand. Usually, Energy in play will have
eaten up some resource for the opponent, whether a
turn’s manual Energy attachment, use of a Max Elixir,
etc. while one from the hand is just there, but
an Energy in play will likely have already paid for
something in the current climate (usually an attack),
and we are in a format of OHKO’s and 2HKO’s; seldom
should you discard an Energy from the opponent’s Active
if you are going to KO that card this turn. Your
local metagame will be a major factor as well because we
see such extremes in decks. Decks that run a good
amount of basic Energy, and cards to reclaim it from the
discard pile, may actually be happy you’re removing some
glut from their hands; makes it easier to draw off of
Shaymin-EX (XY: Roaring Skies 77/108,
106/108) or Oranguru. They will have an
Energy Retrieval, Fisherman, or more deck
specific trick to reclaim what they lost, so they may be
happy you just burned a Supporter on such a thing.
Many decks right now, however, seem fairly tight on
Energy counts. Even if a deck runs a decent amount
of Energy, it wants most or all of it handy. It
may still have a trick to get it back, but it was
counting on that trick for other cards or just
because the deck itself is going to run through its own
Energy pretty quick. Decks that run low counts of
Energy are less likely to have something in hand
to discard, but more likely to feel the hurt when
you actually nail an Energy in hand.
So for Standard and
Expanded play, this is something to keep handy in the
pseudo-sideboard some players maintain (and the rest of
us ought to have). Pay attention to the metagame
going into an event, because this might be one of the
minor deck tweaks worth slipping in if enough players
are running the decks vulnerable to it. That is
just in general; certain specific decks are going to
want to run this card. You’ve got decks where
hitting Energy in the hand solves a problem match-up
because said match-up is against a deck especially
vulnerable to its Energy being discarded from the hand.
That is still likely to only justify a TecH inclusion,
of course, but it is something. Control and/or
mill decks are the most likely customer for Team
Skull Grunt. If you can combo other
hand-control effects, you can leave your opponent either
actually or effectively topdecking. Mill decks
often have at least some control elements, such as
running your opponent out of a particular resource
before you actually run his or her deck out of cards.
Definitely, run this in Limited play: you’ll almost
certainly have room in your deck and Supporter usage to
spare, and even if you didn’t, this is a format where
seeing your opponent’s hand is extra valuable and he or
she is less likely to have a means of replenishing that
lost Energy.
Ratings
Standard:
3.25/5
Expanded:
3.15/5
Limited:
4/5
Summary:
Team Skull Grunt means your Energy is no longer
safe while in hand, beyond the generic threat of your
opponent hitting you with effects like that of N
or Red Card. I expect it to show up as at
least a single in some of the established control decks.
Thanks to what we have learned in the XY-era, I don’t
think Team Skull Grunt will catch as many people
off guard as Team Flare Grunt usage initially
did; the mixed blessing for Team Skull Grunt is
more people giving it a try but also being on guard
against it before it has been proven. I’ll also
add that I appreciate how the effect of knocking two
Energy cards from an opponent’s hand seems appropriate
from what little I know of Team Skull grunts (the
characters, not the cards).
Team Skull Grunt
snagged eight voting points in our top 10
countdown for Sun & Moon; that means it took 11th
place and was just one point away from turning the
three-way tie between 8th, 9th, and 10th place into a
four-way tie including 11th. Of course, it also
only scored one more point than the tie we had for 12th
and 13th place, cards we’ll get too soon enough.
For my personal top 10 list, I had Team Skull Grunt
as my 10th place pick and was a bit sad they didn’t make
the site list.
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