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Tangrowth
(Boundaries Crossed)
I love the flavour text on this card: ‘Even if one of
its arms is eaten, it’s fine’. That’s reassuring to
know, and I just thought I would put it out there.
Tangrowth
is a Stage 1 Pokémon with a very nice 130 HP. Of course
it’s not great by EX standards but hey, it’s as good as
the average Stage 2 and there’s not a lot that will take
it out in one hit, especially as it has Weakness to a
Type (Fire) that you don’t see much (or at all) in the
current format. Water Resistance could be handy too,
considering the popularity of
Blastoise/Keldeo
decks, while the fact that it hits them for Weakness is
good news as well. The one (predictable) disappointment
is the very hefty retreat cost of four. Heavy Balls and
Switches are recommended if you want to use this
Pokémon.
The first attack is the weird and wonderfully named
Hundred Furious Lashes. This has a nominal cost of one
Grass Energy, but really requires a bit more than that
as it does 30 for each Grass Energy attached. In theory,
this could be hitting for huge amounts of damage (6
Energy and it will be OHKOing
an EX!), but in practice it’s nowhere near as good as
you would think. Grass has no real Energy acceleration
at the moment, forcing you to attach manually.
The end result?
Tangrowth will get KO’d
before it can do anything really decent. The worst part
is that it can’t use the attack on consecutive turns
(unless you switch it in and out), so even if you do get
enough Energy for the big hit, you will struggle to get
the best use from it. If you really wanted to go down
this route, both Mewtwo-EX
and Keldeo-EX offer much
more effective ways to ramp up the damage with Energy
attachments as they benefit from acceleration (Blastoise
for Keldeo, anything for
Mewtwo).
Tangrowth’s
second attack, Mega Drain, is clearly supposed to have
some kind of synergy with the first.
For four Energy (only one must be Grass), it does
70 damage and heals 30. I guess the idea is that you hit
for a ton of damage with Hundred Furious Lashes on one
turn, and heal up with Mega Drain on the next, thus
keeping Tangrowth alive for . . . well, not very long
actually. It isn’t going to survive 2 Night Spears from
Darkrai, and I shudder to
think what Mewtwo-EX would
do to it with all that Energy attached.
And there’s the problem. Tangrowth
just isn’t equipped to go toe-to-toe with the big boys
of the format right now. It’s
waaaaaay too slow and doesn’t have enough
durability to counteract that. This card is only worth
remembering for future discussions about strange and
slightly inappropriate attack names. It’s not going to
have any impact on the actual game.
Rating
Modified: 1.75 (awww . . .
who wouldn’t
want to announce an attack called Hundred Furious
Lashes?)
Limited: 4 (quite good here: a decent tank that you can
just build up as a sweeper)
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