Baby Mario
2010 UK
National
Seniors
Champion |
Magcargo
(XY)
Hello and welcome to another week of XY card reviews
here on Pojo’s
CotD. We kick things off
with a look at Magcargo, a
Pokémon that we haven’t seen in the TCG for quite a
while.
Over the years, Magcargo has
had a bit of a theme going on which usually involves him
manipulating the top of the deck for one reason or
another: most famously Magcargo
DX, with its Smooth Over
Power. Magcargo XY can’t
claim the same kind of usefulness, but it does like to
mess with the top card of your deck, specifically by
discarding it for its Magma Mantle attack and doing 50
more damage if it is a Fire Energy (but just 30 if it
isn’t). Sadly, we don’t really have any practical ways
of ‘fixing’ that top card (such as
Pokédex BLW), so you are either running a lot of
Fire Energy or taking a risk on losing something useful.
Neither is worth the bother: you would need a Muscle
Band or a Silver Bangle on Magcargo
even to two-hit KO an EX this way (assuming you got
lucky with the discard). That’s just too many hoops to
jump through when you are using a 110 HP Stage 1.
To be honest, you might as well pay the extra Energy
cost and use Magcargo’s Heat
Blast for a guaranteed vanilla 80. It might not be as
interesting or as fun as Magma Mantle, but it’s just as
good really (and by that I mean ‘not very good at all’).
Truth is, they needed to do a
lot more with Magma Mantle to make this into a playable
card.
Rating
Modified: 1.75 (not good enough to be any fun)
Limited: 2.25 (limited decks tend to run a lot of
Energy, but this still isn’t anything special)
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HEZ
Intro to
Unlimited 150 |
Magcargo.
Standard.
Poor Magcargo, it’s bad in the games and it’s bad as a
card. In the past Magcargo has had a chance to shine,
mainly with the version from Deoxys whose Smooth Over
Ability let you put any card from your deck on top.
Unfortunately the new version is just a simple beater
with no Ability. As usual for an Evolution card since
Black & White it just doesn’t stand up to the many Basic
Pokémon that can do the same thing… even with more HP.
Terrakion is a comparison with similar costed attacks
that hit heavier and more reliably and also following
the new bizarre template of “conditional damage for a
low cost and the exact same amount of damage for 1 more
Energy”.
Perhaps with a little more HP and Magma Mantle at just 1
Energy it’d be worth setting up some way to fix your top
deck, but as it is Fire decks have much better, more
reliable beaters at Basic.
Unlimited 150.
In this format, running a Magcargo line can be
really powerful with the aforementioned Magcargo from
the Deoxys set letting you find any single card from
your huge 100 card deck each turn! If you’re already
running a Slugma or 2 it wouldn’t hurt to run an
attacker in the same line right?
Again, Magma Mantle just isn’t impressive enough to
warrant setting up. For 1 Energy I’d say this would be a
very playable card, but the 2 Energy cost prevents it
coming out of nowhere without Energy acceleration. Its
big Basic competition from Standard mostly get
reclassified as EX but it still isn’t enough to be worth
including generally.
If you want an attacker in your Magcargo line you’re
better off going with the one from Undaunted. Whilst it
requires discarding an awful lot of Energy, it can do
damage limited only by how much Energy you can discard
off it which can be useful when you need to suddenly KO
a big threat.
Ratings.
Standard: 1.5
Unlimited 150: 2.5
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