Baby Mario
2010 UK
National
Seniors
Champion |
#9 Jamming Net
I must admit I had this card and the other Team Flare
Hyper Gear (Head Ringer) a
lot higher
on my own top 10 list.
These Flare Cards introduce a new and subtle mechanic to
the game in a way that we haven’t seen since Team
Galactic’s Power Spray back
in the (much-missed by me) days of SP. They are Pokémon
Tools which you attach
to your
opponent’s EX Pokémon. As you would expect, they do
bad things to them: Jamming Net reduces their attack
damage by 20, while Head Ringer increases their attack
costs.
Obviously, these effects are sweet in themselves and
players will use them to buy an extra turn before a KO
or render relatively low-damage attacks, like
Seismitoad EX’s Quaking
Punch, ineffectual. They also stop your opponent
attaching their own Tools, so no damage-boosting Muscle
Band or retreat-enabling Float Stone. These Tools can be
highly disruptive to an opponent’s game plan when used
carefully. They are not that easy to get rid of either.
Effects that get your Pokémon off the Field will do it
(such as Cassius or Super Scoop Up), but other than that
you are looking at Tool Retriever or
Masquerain PLB’s Ability to
do the job . . . pretty low-utility cards up till now,
but if Flare Tools prove annoying enough, then you can
bet they will get some play.
I for one welcome our Team Flare overlords: these cards
are tricky to use and encourage thoughtful play.
Anything that moves us away from the blunt force trauma
of attach-then-attack-with-an-EX-Pokémon can only enrich
our gaming experience.
Rating
Modified: 4.25 (subtle ways to mess with your opponent)
Expanded: 4.25 (see above)
Limited: 3 (depends on if your opponent pulls an EX,
doesn’t it?)
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aroramage |
Checking out our #9 spot, we've got one of the new
Team Flare Tool cards, Jamming Net! Between this and
Head Jammer, the other Team Flare Tool, this one is
definitely more useful, and we're going to take a look
at why!
Jamming Net and Head Jammer both follow the same set of
rules as Team Flare Tools. They can be attached to any
Pokemon-EX your opponent controls so long as they don't
already have a Tool attached to them, so it's best to
throw these down before your opponent can play a Tool of
their own. Additionally, if one of these is removed for
any reason, it goes straight to the discard pile, so
there's no using Tool Retriever to add one of these put
on your Pokemon-EX to your hand.
With that in mind, Jamming Net and Head Jammer have two
very different effects. Head Jammer forces an extra
Energy to be used on the opponent's EX-attacks, a nifty
stalling tactic that buys you at least one turn unless
they need a DCE to get by and just so happen to have it
or are running something like Blastoise or Emboar. On
the other hand, Jamming Net reduces the damage output of
the Pokemon-EX by 20 before Weakness and Resistance get
applied to any Pokemon!
To put it in perspective, this makes Manectric-EX do 0
damage on his Overrun and only 40 on Assault Laser (100
with the Tool Bonus). Lucario-EX now does 10, 40, and 80
damage on his attacks prior to boosting. Mewtwo-EX and
Yveltal-EX need at least 1 more Energy somewhere when
attacking to KO things as hard! Rayquaza-EX has to go
for 4 Energy to guarantee KOs rather than 3! Genesect-EX
can't even equip a G Booster to himself to get rid of
the net!
There's plenty of Pokemon-EX around, both in Standard
and Expanded. so Jamming Net won't have much of a
shortage of targets unless you're going up against a
deck that doesn't rely so much on EX, such as the
Dusknoir-Flygon-Accelgor deck or a variant of the
Empoleon deck. For now, in a format where EX are heavily
used, Jamming Net's got a lot of usage.
Rating
Standard: 3.5/5 (requires an EX to be attached, but the
damage reduction is supremely useful)
Expanded: 4/5 (more EX means more targets!)
Limited: 4/5 (better to run it for those +39 decks at
least)
Arora Notealus: I wonder what the video game effects of
stuff like Head Jammer and Jamming Net would be like...
Next Time: A dragon descends again in new form!
|
Otaku |
For those of us in the United States of America over the
age of 18, its Election Day. Remember that it is
important to not just vote but to vote informed; while I
discourage people from abstaining completely, there
should be something on the ballot to which you can agree
with a firm “yes” or “no” and thus signify that you’re
paying attention even if you don’t like many of the
choices, or struggled to find adequate information on
the options given.
Welcome dear readers as we continue the first week of
our Top 10 Promising Cards of XY: Phantom Forces!
As a reminder, reprint cards are not eligible as the
review crew each submits a 10 card list to Pojo, who
then averages them out to produce the master Top 10 list
we use for the review order. The official release date
for this set in the U.S. is November 5th, so XY:
Phantom Forces cards aren’t tournament legal until
November 21st; however we’ll be scoring them as if they
were indeed legal.
Jamming Net
(XY: Phantom Forces 98/119) is one of the new
“Pokémon Tool F” cards. As you know there are three
major divisions in Pokémon cards: Pokémon, Trainers and
Energy. Within Trainers, there are Items, Stadiums and
Supporters. Within Items there are… quite a few,
especially if we include abandoned mechanics. Relevant
to this discussion one long running (though not
original) mechanic are Pokémon Tools, and Pokémon Tool F
cards are their new subdivision. So are Team Flare
Hyper Gear cards, a status indicated as part of (or
possibly simply after - it isn’t unprecedented strange
as it sounds) the card’s name. There is also a large
read “stamp” printed on the card that reads “Flare” in
the card’s effect text area, with the actual effect text
showing over it (where the two overlap). No idea yet of
the exact relevance, but fellow Robot Substitute
Team Flare Hyper Gear (XY: Phantom Forces
102/119) lacks it while Head Ringer Team Flare Hyper
Gear (XY: Phantom Forces 97/119) shares it;
the latter is also a Pokémon Tool F. For now there are
no effects that reference either Team Flare Hyper Gear
or the Flare stamp, but this could change.
While I haven’t played a lot of TCGs (about half a
dozen), cards that you attach to something of your
opponent’s can be quite common or rare, depending on how
the game works… but for Pokémon its a brand new thing.
This will require some care just due to the simple
things like not walking away with someone else’s cards.
Relevant to the review, Pokémon Tool F cards still
count as the one Pokémon Tool you're allowed to attach
to a Pokémon (at least under normal circumstances).
This already gives the Pokémon Tool F cards a bonus use
as well as a weakness; attaching one will prevent your
opponent attaching his or her own Pokémon Tool, but at
the same time any Pokémon-EX with a Pokémon Tool is
effectively protected from Pokémon Tool F cards (at
least until you use something like Startling
Megaphone). Of course if you have any Pokémon Tool
F cards already in play, you’d hit them as well with any
non-selective, mass discarding effects so that’s another
potential issue. Pokémon Tool F can only attach to
Pokémon-EX; while those are the most common attackers
and dominate the format, they are not the entire format
even now. They also state that when an effect removes
them from a Pokémon, they are automatically discarded;
this is to prevent accidentally sending them to the
wrong player’s hand, deck or discard pile, though of
course it means any effect that could move them also
discards them.
So what about Jamming Net itself? We have a
problem; it contains a confusing phrase stating that
damage done “…to all Defending Pokémon…” that in the
past was only used because of the alternative rules that
allowed players to have two Active Pokémon at once.
Normally you would just write it as “Your opponent’s
Pokémon” if it was supposed to reduce damage done to the
opponent’s Active Pokémon and Benched Pokémon, while
just reducing damage done to the opponent’s Active would
simply be written as that (…damage done to the
opponent’s Active Pokémon…) or “…the Defending Pokémon.”
It could be quite a significant difference; Landorus-EX
is already popular for hitting Active and a Benched
Pokémon, Manectric-EX might become popular for it
as well, while a Pokémon-EX that hit every one of your
opponent’s Pokémon in play (such as the Expanded Legal
Groudon-EX) would be significantly diminished.
Still, even if it was just bad wording and it does
only reduce the damage to the opponent’s Active Pokémon,
it can be fairly handy; you’re blocking a different
Pokémon Tool like a Muscle Band, so you could
create an effective -40 damage as compared to what your
opponent intended. That may not always matter, however;
in order to be useful in that situation you need to make
sure that a OHKO becomes a 2HKO, a 2HKO becomes a 3HKO,
etc. An attacker that was going to hit a 180 HP
Pokémon-EX for 110 damage twice doesn’t really care that
its technically doing 20 less.
Early combos for this card are leading with a
Startling Megaphone (or in Expanded, Tool
Scrapper) to clear the way for Pokémon Tool F cards,
setting up so that Manectric-EX will get
the extra damage from its second attack, and attempting
to revive the Tool Drop decks built around Trubbish
(BW: Plasma Storm 65/135). To be blunt, right
now I’m not overly impressed with the Pokémon Tool F
cards; even without any special measures taken just to
counter this strategy, some decks have options. The
simplest is - as so many attackers are resource light -
abandoning the equipped Pokémon-EX, at least until it
can still make a worthwhile attack with its reduced
damage capacity or you do get to something that can
ditch the Jamming Net. Decks that run Super
Scoop Up or the new AZ for bouncing their own
Pokémon will shed Pokémon Tool F cards as a side-effect,
and some decks may even run Tool Retriever
already for those key moments of Tool swapping.
As stated yesterday, Manectric-EX and its
fighting Weakness make me hesitant to rely on it as a
main attacker… and as a secondary I’m not sure if it is
worth the space to run Pokémon Tool F cards. Tool
Drop’s “revival” is also something I doubt; it does
benefit from a few of the cards released in this set,
but it still seems like a very fragile combo… the type
that only works when people don’t see it coming, or
refuse to acknowledge it as a threat. When it comes to
running cards to “mess with your opponent”, I think I’d
prefer that slot go to Enhanced Hammer (recently
reprinted) or the like instead of something this
specific.
Ratings
Standard:
3.25/5 - I think its a good card, but in a metagame of
great cards.
Expanded:
3.25/5 - Before thinking it through I had expected
Tool Scrapper to make it worse here, but not being
forced to discard Pokémon Tool F you already have in
play is likely to regularly benefit a deck using them,
while other decks really only benefit from the
“downgrade” from Startling Megaphone in this one
match-up.
Limited:
3.25/5 - Same score, but it is also a must run. How can
that be? The vast majority of the time it will simply
do you no good as your opponent won’t have any
Pokémon-EX to target. The rare times when they do, it
can be quite the lifesaver and your opponent will be
hard pressed to get rid of it. Generally Limited decks
can spare the space for a specialized Trainer, so always
go for it but realize it won’t actually be used very
often.
Summary:
As you might have guessed, Jamming Net didn’t
make my own Top 10. I am intrigued by this mechanic but
that doesn’t mean I expect it to prove strong
immediately. Definitely a card to keep an eye on and
obtain a playset of (if the price is right), and the
threat of it and its counterpart Head Ringer
might help shift the game away from being quite so
heavily Pokémon-EX dominated again (though the
beneficiaries would simply be regular big, Basic
Pokémon).
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