Baby Mario
2010 UK
National
Seniors
Champion |
Espeon
(Plasma Freeze)
Hello and welcome to the new week of reviews here on
Pojo’s
CotD. We will finish taking a look at the new
Team Plasma Eeveelutions,
and end the week with a couple of other (hopefully
interesting cards.
We kick off
with Espeon, the
ever-popular Psychic Type which evolves from
Eevee. At first glance,
there’s nothing very remarkable or appealing about the
card: being Team Plasma means it is well supported of
course, but, crucially, 90 HP on a Stage 1 doesn’t do it
any favours as virtually any competitive deck will OHKO
it with ease. Of course if you decided to run it in a
dedicated Eeveelution deck,
it would benefit from even more support such as the
Signs of Evolution Eevee and
the Glaceon PLF which would
give it free retreat. However, I don’t believe an
Eeveelutions deck is viable
which the 4 Eevee
restriction remains in place: running all those cute
techs just doesn’t allow for sufficient attacking
options. Devolution Spray leaves
Eevee unable to evolve for a turn, so that isn’t
much of a solution either. What the deck needs is
something like a reprint of Surprise! Time Machine to
let you switch Eeveelutions
around at will.
Espeon
does have a couple of very interesting and cheap attacks
though. For one Colourless Energy,
Psy Alert does 20 damage (which won’t usually be
significant) and allows you to draw until you have six
cards in hand. Basically, it’s a Bianca with a bit of
bonus damage and although this isn’t horrible, and could
even be very helpful in some situations, it is not
anything worth running a Stage 1 for. You may as well
just run more of Bianca herself, or even Tropical Beach:
the extra card being worth a lot more than the 20
damage.
Shadow Ball is a bit more tempting however. For the low
cost of a single Psychic Energy, you can do
40 damage to one of your
opponent’s Pokémon. That’s excellent value in itself,
but the effect text makes it even more intriguing:
Weakness and Resistance are applied to Benched Pokémon.
If I recall correctly, the only other Pokémon that
applied Weakness while sniping the Bench was
Drifblim FB, which saw a
little bit of play during the SP era. It’s a very nice
effect to have, only right
now I am struggling to think of situations where you
could take advantage of it. OHKOing
Benched Trubbish, I suppose
would be the main one. Espeon
could also two-shot a Garbodor
or Mew-EX, or three-hit KO a Mewtwo-EX,
but most decks would have more efficient and faster ways
of getting those jobs done.
I’m not completely prepared to dismiss this card as
rubbish because you never know what future formats and
releases may bring. It’s a cute, well designed card with
low cost attacks that could be
situationally useful . . . but useful enough to
run a 90 HP Stage 1 for? Not right now, I’m afraid.
Rating
Modified: 2.25 (interesting and may have some potential)
Limited: 4.5 (draw power
and sniping
in one card? Yeah, I’ll take it)
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