MonsterOfTheLake's Lake

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02-17-2009

Blaziken
(DP-On)
 

Aloha readers from Hawaii, and hello to the rest of you! And hola if you're from Mexico. Or Spain. You know what, forget it, none of you are getting greeted. Except for reader Vicinius Vicinius, who REEKS of awesomeness. The rest of you, send in some feedback. Pretty please? Kingdra has been dominant throughout BRs and Cities, but it has died down considerably. Meanwhile, Grass decks rejoiced at the release of Shaymin Lv.X, giving Torterra an unnecessary +40HP. Thus, it's time to take those Heatrans out of the binder and take another look at this season's neglected type, Fire. Fire types, alongside their Lightning type buddies, tend to discard Energy cards when attacking. That's generally not a good thing, as you are skipping precious Energy attachments to power up your active, who's rigorously discarding all Energy cards you attach to it. And then your active is finally brought down, and voila -- you have nothing else powered up. While you swear like a sailor at Charizard for discarding 7 Energy to do its 400 damage attack, instead of just having ONE NORMAL ATTACK FOR ONCE, and your opponent smugly surveys the play area, knowing he has pretty much won the game. Yes, he, because women don't smugly survey the play area. Sugar and spice and all that.

So very red

Onto the list.
 

//NAME: Blaziken

Well, this part should be obvious.
 

// Pokémon (20)
3 Torchic GE
1 Torchic PT
2 Combusken GE
2 Blaziken GE
2 Blaziken PT
2 Baltoy GE
2 Claydol GE
1 Heatran S8
1 Heatran LV.X
1 Palkia MD
1 Palkia LV.X
1 Uxie L.55 LA
1 Azelf L.55 LA
 

I'm happy enough with this line-up, and I encourage all of you to go try your own variations. There are two Torchics, one with 50 HP and one with 60. The 50 HP one has better attacks, assuming you don't have the ability to flip heads whenever you like. If you happen to possess that ability, play the 60 HP one, because R for 80 is fun. Combuskens should be the Great Encounters ones.

Now, the fun part: Blazikens. I think a 2/2 line works here. Ideally, you want to get both out as early as you can. Against a set up deck, you want to attack with the GE Blaziken, sniping their vital cards. One shotting a BENCHED Claydol is simply brutal. On the other hand, against something like Palkia G or Regigigas, where the set up is handled through dropping basics, you might want to focus on damaging the active as much as you can, instead of KOing a benched Uxie so they can TSD it back and reuse it.

A 2/2 Claydol line with 1 Uxie is our Poké-draw line-up.

Now, onto the 1/1 Lv.X lines. This deck simply will not function without a Heatran Lv.X. Its Power allows you to keep using Blazikens' attacks without having to discard those 2 Energy, which is simply amazing. 80 a turn to any Pokémon for the low, low cost of 1RR, or just a plain 100 to the active for the same cost. As you can see, Heatran is quite important to the deck. So why aren't we running 2/2? I actually ran 2/2 when I first built the deck, but my friend Jayson has made quite a good case for going with 1/1. With a little help from Azelf, you should be fine with a 1/1 line.

Palkia Lv.X is a very fun card. You might be wondering why we would want to Restructure, when we can already hit the Bench. Simple: Bring up something that can't easily retreat, such as a tech Dialga G Lv.X, Skuntank G, Shaymin Lv.X, Claydol, opponents' Palkia Lv.Xs, etc. Using Blaziken PT's power, burn them. Now snipe off their main threats, while they are stuck with an Active they can't retreat, nor use Powers. It's pretty fun to watch people squirm while you're picking off their bench. If you're a bad person, that is.

Of course, you ought to keep in mind that you will have a Palkia and Heatran out, and your opponent will always bring up one of those two. That's why we're running 4 Switches to get you out of that spot of bother, though.

Also, you might have noticed that we're not running Unown Gs here. If your metagame has a lot of Dusknoir, you should throw 2-3 in. Mine doesn't, so I didn't. Nyah.

// Trainers (17)
2 Level Max
1 Luxury Ball
2 Night Maintenance
4 Rare Candy
2 Stark Mountain
4 Switch
2 Warp Point
 

A standard line. We run 2 Level Maxes to get that T2/3 Heatran Lv.X. We got 2 Stark Mountains here, and with those two being the only way we can get rid of a Dusknoir Lv.X/Galactic HQ, you have to time them really well. And finally, 4 Switches and 2 Warp Points allow us to abuse Palkia Lv.X to our heart's extent.

// Supporters (10)
4 Bebe's Search
2 Cynthia's Feelings
4 Roseanne's Research
 

Again, highly standard. You should be maxing Bebe's/Roseanne's in pretty much every single deck. 2 Cynthia's allow us to recover nicely.

// Energy (13)
4 Call Energy
9 Fire Energy
 

And finally, Energy. 13 might seem a bit low, but you should not be attaching to anything other than Blazikens, and thanks to Heatran Lv.X, we're not discarding these admittedly few Energies from our Blazing Chickens.

 

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Feedback

(You can send in your feedback at PoJoMOTL@gmail.com)

 

Hello, Monster of the Lake!

You articles are really, really good. You know how to point out the strenghts (and the weaknesses) of each card. I'm sure it helps all players, from beginners to experts, from Juniors to Masters divisions. (Your jokes are gold, too!)

Keep up the good work!
-Vini

PS: The Saga of the Sets series is not only funny, but also an excellent way to review past sets. Definitely my favorite articles!

Thanks a lot, Vinicius Vinicius (if that's your actual name, that's quite possibly the greatest name I have ever seen). I'll hopefully do a few more Saga of Sets pretty soon. See, RaNd0m cheated, and did the EASY sets, with 60-70 cards in each set. D&P sets have around 130 cards in each set! I GOT RIPPED OFF!

 

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There you go, then. Give Blaziken a try, and let me know how you do with it. Unless you run into a lot of Kingdras and decide to send me hatemail. Ehh, why not, go ahead and send that in as well. I forgive you in advance =P


PoJoMOTL@gmail.com

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