Baby Mario
2010 UK
National
Seniors
Champion |
Startling Megaphone
We have some extremely powerful Tools in the format
right now: namely Muscle Band, G Booster, Silver Bangle,
and Float Stone, plus a range of decent but rarely-used
stuff like Giant Cape and Hard Charm, so having a card
that deals with them is almost certainly necessary.
Startling Megaphone is like the nuclear option for Tool
destruction – it discards every single one from your
opponent’s Pokémon.
Up until now we have had Tool Scrapper, which seemed to
do a pretty good job. There are also some situations
where Tool Scrapper’s option to discard your own Tool
make it a superior card to Startling Megaphone: say you
wanted to replace a Muscle Band with a G Booster on
Genesect, or wanted a Float
Stone on Garbodor after
having to use something else. For decks not using those
Pokémon, though, they might as well play Megaphone.
Because Scrapper already forces players to be
conservative with Tools, I don’t expect the increased
power of Megaphone to have too much of an impact right
now. The exception to this is the slightly obscure
Sigilyph/Trubbish
Tool Drop deck, which is killed stone dead by the
printing of this card. With Tool Scrapper highly likely
to rotate out in September, we needed either a reprint
or a replacement, and this is what we have: after all,
something has to keep all those Muscle Bands and
Garbodors in check.
Rating
Modified: 3.5 (most decks will play one or two)
Limited: 1.25 (Protection Cube is the only Tool in the
set, so this is all but useless)
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HEZ
Intro to
Unlimited 150 |
Startling Megaphone.
Unlimited 150 review.
Wow, what a hateful card! Some designer decided Tool
Scrapper just wasn’t enough Tool hate for Standard and
that Trubbish absolutely could not be a cool little
attacker and killed an entire deck with this card.
In U150 there’s 3 similar cards to pick from for this
role; Windstorm, Tool Scrapper and Startling Megaphone.
From experience, it seems people only want to dedicate 1
slot to this effect and go with the more versatile
Windstorm if they can get it. 2 is the maximum, so in
this case Startling Megaphone will replace Tool
Scrapper.
How will Starting Megaphone affect Tool decks though?
It’s surely going to be a powerful play the turn it
happens, even with just 1 in a deck, it can be recurred
to devastate the Tool player with just 1 card. Slowking
builds do have the Unseen Forces one which thrives off
Tool in the discard, but it will be crippling to a fully
loaded Sigilyph (Plasma Blast).
Rating: 4 (I really dislike this level of hate
being printed but this card has a very strong effect.)
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