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Pojo's Pokémon Card of the Day

 

Oricorio
- S&M: Guardians Rising
- #GRI 55

Date Reviewed:
July 19, 2017

Ratings & Reviews Summary

Standard: 1.88
Expanded: 2.00
Limited: 2.72

Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale.
1 being horrible.  3 ... average.  5 is awesome.

Back to the main COTD Page


aroramage

Casual Slap, more like Casual I don't really care for this vanilla 2-for-30 Slap. 

This is the other Oricorio in the set, and this one likes hula-dancing to its Ability, Vital Dance. Basically, when you play this Oricorio, you'll get to add 2 basic Energy cards from your deck to your hand. Now normally, I would say this Ability's...okay. Yes, it does thin your deck out, and it'll make it less likely that later on you'll hit a dead draw from getting the Energy card when you really need that one Supporter, though I don't know how often that situation comes up anyway. But you still will need to take 2 turns to play both of those Energy cards, so at least one of them is just sitting in your hand doing...not that much. 

Then I thought, "Say, wouldn't Volcanion decks like this?" 

So there's a thought. Try it in something that would want the Energy in hand, like Volcanion or Greninja BREAK. Otherwise, you could probably just dump it with a Supporter into the discard and go from there...but then you could do that anyway if you just draw through everything. 

Rating 

Standard: 2.5/5 (not a bad option, but I guess...not really a necessary one?) 

Expanded: 2.5/5 (I think only Volcanion and Greninja could really take advantage of Vital Dance) 

Limited: 3.5/5 (possibly M Gardevoir-EX as well, mainly for discard fodder for her own attack) 

Arora Notealus: Pink hula dancing bird is pretty nice. I should grab me one of those......I should just start playing Sun and Moon again. 

Next Time: BONK


21times

Oricorio (Guardians Rising, 55/145) comes out of the Guardians Rising expansion set.  The version we are covering today is the Psychic type with the ability Vital Dance which allows you, when you play this card from your hand and put this Pokemon on your bench, to search your deck for two Basic energy cards and put them into your hand.  It’s basically a Professor’s Letter (Breakthrough, 146/162) as an ability.

And that’s why it sees no use.  If it were able to get a Special energy (even just one!) or if you were able to attach those two Basic energies, it would be fantastic and see a LOT of play.  But to take up a space on your bench only to put two Basic energy in your hand?  No thanks.  Plus, there’s a Ribombee coming out in Burning Shadows that lets you grab two Basic energy every turn, not only when played.

Rating

Standard: 1 out of 5

Conclusion

I just don’t think that this card adds any value.  Taking up a bench spot for only two Basic energy is just not going to increase your win percentage.


Otaku

Time to review Oricorio (SM: Guardians Rising 55/145).  It is a Basic, Psychic-Type Pokémon with 90 HP, Psychic Weakness, no Resistance, Retreat Cost [C], an Ability, and an attack.  The Ability is “Vital Dance”, which triggers when you Bench Oricorio during your turn.  Simply put, it acts as a Professor’s Letter, allowing you to search your deck for up to two basic Energy cards and then add them to your hand.  For [PC] it can use “Casual Slap” to do 30 damage.  Being a Basic is the best and means this card is easy to run as a single, maxed out, or anything in between.  Being a Psychic-Type is probably not going to matter for this card, though if you have a reason to use it with Psychic-Type support it will benefit slightly.  90 HP means it is a probable OHKO, even more so when its Psychic Weakness becomes a factor; most Types have multiple “budget” attackers that make any Weakness dangerous at 90 HP.  Lack of Resistance is typical so moving on, the Retreat Cost of [C] is good (though not great); you won’t want to pay it over and over, but once or twice shouldn’t be too bad.  Vital Dance is okay; it doesn’t do a lot, but it’s easy enough to trigger one time unless Bench-space is at a premium.  Casual Slap is blatant filler; with Dimension Valley or similar help it becomes a mediocre attack; most of the time you’ll just be using it for the Ability or not at all. 

There are already three other Oricorio cards, and as we may not get to all of them, I’m going to indulge and run through them really quick.  We have SM: Guardians Rising 14/145, SM: Guardians Rising 46/145, and SM: Guardians Rising 56/145 (also released as SM: Black Star Promos SM19).  All are Basic Pokémon with 90 HP, Retreat Cost [C], and two attacks.  SM: Guardians Rising 14/145 is a Fire-Type with Water Weakness and no Resistance.  For [R] it can use “Passionate Dance” to search your deck for up to three Fire-Type Basic Pokémon and play them directly to your Bench.  For [RR] it can use “Kindle” to do 30 damage and… that wording is a bit confusing.  The attack requires you discard an Energy from “this Pokémon”, and then you discard an Energy from your opponent’s Active.  I can only assume the “If you do…” clause is there in case some combo exists (or will exist) that would let you use the attack sans attached Energy on the attacker.  The stats are somewhat relevant, but the attacks are what could make or break this card.  Both have solid potential, though Passionate Dance is a bit slow and Kindle is a bit pricey, if you can spare the time or spam “Steam-Up” (via Volcanion-EX), they can be helpful.  What is more, Fire-Type decks sometimes need to add Energy to hand, so it is possible that they might want to run both today’s SM: Guardians Rising 55/145 and SM: Guardians Rising 14/145.  Then again, I doubt you’d want to run four of each, so they still don’t truly clash. 

SM: Guardians Rising 46/145 is a Lightning-Type with Fighting Weakness and Metal Resistance.  I’m not sure how useful being a Lightning-Type will prove, and while the Fighting Weakness should ensure a OHKO against that matchup, while Metal Resistance might still manage to prove helpful (but probably not too often).  Both of its attacks cost [L], so they are nice and inexpensive.  We’ll be reviewing them in reverse order for a reason that should quickly become apparent: “Pom-Pom Punch” does a so-so 20 damage while using “Feather Dance” places an effect on itself that raises the base damage of Pom-Pom Punch to 100.  Doing 100 damage over two turns, even for a single Energy, is unimpressive, if not downright weak, and the “combo” in question is so fragile it seems unlikely it will actually work.  There are just too many ways to remove the effect, even if you can add other factors to somehow make the damage output worthwhile.  That means this version is not going to combo with or be a threat to today’s, so we’ll move onto the last one. 

SM: Guardians Rising 56/145 is another Psychic-Type but this time with Darkness Weakness and Fighting Resistance, which again are deadly and (possibly) handy.  Both of its attacks cost [C].  “Supernatural Dance” allows you to place an amount of damage counters equal to the number of Pokémon in your opponent’s discard pile on any of your opponent’s Pokémon, distributed between them all as you see fit.  “Revelation Dance” does 30 damage, but only if you have a Stadium in play.  Supernatural Dance potentially makes this Oricorio into a super-sniper, especially against classic decks like Night March that put a lot of Pokémon into their own discard pile and have several low HP targets in play all at once.  Revelation Dance is filler, but at least there are decent odds a Stadium will already be in play; I actually found myself slapping a Choice Band onto this Oricorio during a match against a Psychic Weak Pokémon-GX for an expendable attacker that was doing 120 for one Energy.  Again, you’re probably not maxing out on this version, so no harm in running them together should your deck actually need both.  We already reviewed SM: Guardians Rising 56/145 here; based on my limited usage I am already tempted to reduce its scores in Standard and Expanded to a flat three-out-of-five but like I said, it was very limited usage.  As for Oricorio (SM: Guardians Rising 55/145), I didn’t get to try it out in Standard or Expanded, but being a way for Pokémon search to ultimately get basic Energy means it might have a chance.  Besides decks with high basic Energy (in hand) needs, it also can be another warm body for Sky Field decks.  It should be quite useful for Limited play, as you can probably spare the deck and Bench space and will probably need help getting specific basic Energy in hand.  This Oricorio shows up in the “Steel Sun” Theme Deck, where it’s good but not great. 

Ratings 

Standard: 2/5 

Expanded: 2/5 

Limited: 3.75/5 

Theme: 3.65/5 

Conclusion 

Oricorio (SM: Guardians Rising 55/145) is basically a Professor’s Letter that gets around Item lock but eats up a Bench slot and has to deal with Ability lock.  Still, as I’ve seen some players make good use of Steven because of Item lock, I’m not going to rule out niche usage, or possibly mainstream if Item lock becomes thoroughly dominant again.  While I credit it for not helping Garbodor (SM: Guardians Rising 51/145) and its “Trashalanche”, it runs afoul of Garbodor (XY: BREAKpoint 57/122) and its “Garbotoxin”, so that’s a major archetype where Oricorio just can’t win.


Vince
Today we’re looking at Oricorio 55/145 Guardians Rising.  Unlike the other Oricorio that we’ve reviewed two weeks ago, this one has an ability and an attack.  PC for 30 is nothing home to write about so it must be the ability.  Vital Dance functions the same as Professor’s Letter, letting you search your deck for two basic energies and put it onto your hand.  This is probably a good way to get energies in case Professor’s Letter can’t be used due to item lock, but at the same time, if abilities are being shut down, then Professor’s Letter would be the alternative action to take.  Unfortunately, a deck can possibly employ both item lock and ability lock such as Garbodor/Seismitoad-EX, rendering the energy searching methods useless. Besides having a useful ability, Oricorio can’t do much.
 
Ratings:
 
Standard: 2/5 
Expanded: 1.5/5 
Limited: 2/5
 
Coming Up:  WHAM! Your special energy is gone!


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