aroramage |
Ahhhhh, Double Colorless Energy,
often abbreviated DCE but never duplicated...well, not
directly at least, the effect of providing multiple
Energy has been used every now and again though.
DCE though is the OG of the
double-Energy crew, coming all the way back to us again
in Sun & Moon ever since Base Set days. It does the same
thing as it's ever done - provided two Colorless Energy
to a Pokemon. Being a Special Energy, you can only have
4 copies of it in your deck, and there are a lot of ways
to work with it - and against it. Needless to say, the
card has seen a lot of use over time, and it remains a
staple in several decks even now.
The uses are very broad too. While
it can't work well with anything requiring all of one
Energy, it can easily power up a lot of Pokemon much
faster than others - especially Colorless Pokemon like
one Tauros-GX. The only thing that can really get rid of
it is a deck based on Energy removal - Hammer decks,
attacks that discard any Energy or Special Energy in
particular, etc. But then there are of course ways to
remedy this, such as Special Charge.
DCE is as iconic to the game as
Pikachu is to the franchise, and chances are you'll
continue to see this be used in the future for a very
very long time.
Rating
Standard: 4/5 (an absolute treasure
to have)
Expanded: 4/5 (just be wary of what
it has to contend with)
Limited: 5/5 (and you ought to be
fine with using it anywhere!)
Arora Notealus: DCE is an
indispensable part of many decks and sometimes is the
only Energy worth running in certain decks.
Vengeance-style decks and Night March decks recently
were the biggest benefactors of DCE, and look how well
they turned out! Course while they may be waning in
popularity, having access to Tauros-GX is pretty much a
boon for every Outrage deck in the game - I wouldn't be
surprised if Tauros-GX himself has his own deck built
around him.
Next Time: Everyone's favorite
girl? Well at the very least she's certainly a
character-GET BACK IN THE BAG!!
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21times |
Double Colorless Energy
(Evolutions, 90/108) provides not one, but two,
yes count them, two energy for the price of one!
What a bargain, what a deal – in fact, it is so
impactful that some decks build their complete energy
strategy around this card.
Since the beginning of the new rotation, a
majority of the decks in the top eight of almost all of
the regionals tournaments have run four
DCE.
Being able to attach two energy in one turn is a
significant advantage for a player as energy attachment
acceleration is crucial to the determination of the
outcome of many matches.
In most cases in the meta today, the winner of a
match is the player who was able to attach more energy
more quickly than his or her opponent.
As mentioned above, many decks carry only four
DCE, and many
of them have had significant success in the current
meta. While
Decidueye GX
(Sun & Moon, 12/149) is the hot deck for
DCE at the
moment, Yveltal
EX (XY, 144/146),
Gyarados (Ancient
Origins, 21/98),
Vespiquen (Ancient
Origins, 10/98), and
Mega Mewtwo EX
(Breakthrough, 64/162) have all had top eight
finishes at Standard regionals tournaments in the
current rotation.
A couple of these decks,
Vespiquen and
Gyarados, run
only four DCE.
Unfortunately, the arch nemesis of the
DCE is the
Enhanced Hammer
(Black & White Dark Explorers, 94/108).
Without requiring the flip of a coin, this card
allows your opponent to remove any special energy,
including DCE,
from one of your Pokemon and place it in your discard
pile.
Fortuntately, the expansion Steam Siege gave us
the brand new card
Special Charge
(105/114) which allows you to return two special energy
cards from your discard pile and back into your deck.
This frequently saves decks that rely heavily on
DCE,
especially if an opponent plays several hammers or if
you have a DCE
or two prized.
Other Pokemon that rarely see play but potentially could
help facilitate the acceleration of finding and
attaching DCE
are Solrock (Primal
Clash, 83/160) and
Clawitzer (Steam
Siege, 34/114).
Solrock’s
attack Solar
Generator allows you to search your deck for two
special energy cards and put them into your hand.
Clawitzer’s ability,
Mega Boost,
allows you to attach a special energy (in addition to
your regular energy attachment) to any of your Mega
Evolution Pokemon.
However, neither of these Pokemon has seen much
play, but they provide ways for a player to attempt to
search and find
DCE more quickly than simply relying on the luck of
the draw from normal Supporter cards and
Shaymin EX (Roaring
Skies, 106/108).
We do not have a card in the meta right now that
would act as a
Professor’s Letter (Breakthrough, 146/162)
for special energy.
That’s something that the
DCE dependent
player desperately needs because about the only drawback
to DCE is
that you’re only allowed to have four of them in your
deck.
Rating
Standard: 4 out of 5
Summary
While not for use in every deck, the
Double Colorless
Energy card provides the opportunity for a player to
accelerate energy attachment to attack for more damage
more quickly than would be possible otherwise.
Many successful decks use
DCE, and some
carry it as their only source of energy.
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Otaku |
Double Colorless
Energy
is a Special Energy card that provides two units of
Colorless Energy. Seems very simple and
straightforward, but you know I can ramble on
incessantly go deeper with it. Starting with
the obvious, just to ensure we are all on the same page,
welcome to Throwback Thursday; this is the first Special
Energy card ever released with Pokémon. Enjoy a
laugh at my expense; when my friends and I were learning
the game back in early 1999 when the TCG was brand new
in North America, we made a really stupid
mistake. One that is on me, because I made it and
they just went along with me on it. As the first
Special Energy card, Double Colorless Energy was
sandwiched between the Trainers and the basic Energy
cards in Base Set. It was also gray,
similar (but different) from all the Trainers, so even
though the manual explained Special Energy cards,
I somehow got it into my head that Double Colorless
Energy was to be treated as a Trainer. Not
even all the time, so that I could at least be
consistently wrong; we would let each other play it like
an Item but we still allowed Energy Removal and
Super Energy Removal to target it. I
probably destroyed my friend’s ability to enjoy the
game, as he (logically) built his deck around such a
broken concept, only to find out at our first chance to
play with a larger group of people it didn’t work that
way. At all. Sorry, Elric.
Now, as a Special
Energy, Double Colorless Energy has to follow the
4 Copy Rule, unlike basic Energy. Though there are
some cards like Special Charge that work only for
Special Energy, as well as several card effects that
just don’t care whether Energy is basic or Special, like
Fairy Garden and its Retreat Cost zeroing ways,
most Energy support (like Energy Retrieval)
specifically only works for basic Energy while
many effects that discard your opponent’s Energy (like
Enhanced Hammer) only work on Special
Energy. No longer the case, but for a time the
effect text was redundant, as the Energy symbols found
on one of the two upper corners of the card told you the
default value of the Energy card, whether it was
attached, in the deck, the discard pile, or the hand.
I miss that. As for the quality of the effect,
Energy of any Type can fulfill a [C] requirement,
so having a Special Energy that provides [CC] should be
balanced against basic Energy that can meet a single
Energy requirement of the appropriate Type or any
[C] requirement, right? Hypothetically possible,
but it would require an incredibly precise balance in
various Energy costs, and would have a high likelihood
of making Double Colorless Energy a pretty weak
card. The reality has been, of course, quite the
opposite.
In the days of
Base Set only, Double Colorless Energy helped
a few cards stand out, and sometimes was handy for
paying retreat costs. Which was enough to still
make Double Colorless Energy a good card, even
though Base Set also gave us Energy Removal
and Super Energy Removal. Jungle brought
us Scyther (Jungle 10/64, 26/64; Base
Set 2 17/130; Platinum 130/127), and while
its stats would have still made it a good card,
Double Colorless Energy mean its vanilla
30-for-[CCC] “Slash” attack could be readied in two
turns and thus worth the effort, elevating the entire
package to “loose staple”. This set also gave us
Wigglytuff (Jungle 16/64, 32/64; Base
Set 2 19/130) and its “Do the Wave” attack for
[CCC], good for 10 damage plus another 10 for each of
your Benched Pokémon. Without Double Colorless
Energy, this would have been too slow even though it
was a PlusPower away from OHKOing some of the
strongest attackers of the time (as they were typically
Basic Pokémon with 70 HP). Without Double
Colorless Energy, Do The Wave decks wouldn’t have
been a “thing”, and it was one of the top decks of the
time. Does this really matter now? Yes, it
does, because this demonstrates how it goes with
Double Colorless Energy; attacks that are more or
less fairly priced for the time go from “average” to
“good”, from “good” to “great”, etc. We won’t
sweat the details of the rest of the early metagame;
Double Colorless Energy was reprinted in Base Set
2, but Base Set 2 was among the sets
eliminated by the shift to Modified (what we now
call “Standard”) play.
So for nearly 10
years, the game went on with Double Colorless Energy
only being a significant part of Unlimited Format play.
Then, to the surprise of many, Double Colorless
Energy returned in HeartGold/SoulSilver. Right
away, it made some of the then older cards still in
the format stronger. A notable example would be
Garchomp C Lv.X; Double Colorless Energy
helped fuel the [CCC] cost and two Energy discard cost
of its “Dragon Rush” attack, which let you hit one of
your opponent’s Pokémon for 80 damage. I realize
you’d need a full write up of the metagame to really
appreciate what that meant at the time, but the short
version it was good. There was a Pokémon Tool,
Energy Gain, that already allowed Garchomp C
Lv.X to shave [C] off its attack costs and Uxie (DP:
Legends Awakened 43/146) had 70 HP and a Poké-Power
called “Set Up”. Its Set Up is almost identical to
the Ability found on Shaymin-EX (XY: Roaring
Skies 77/108, 106/108) but it draws until you
have seven cards in hand, not just six.
Maybe you don’t need a full write up after all.
Now, the designers
have not adjusted their card design to keep
Double Colorless Energy from breaking certain
attacks. We aren’t even going to worry about what
it helped in the HS-era releases, but we are going
straight to one of the cards people loved and/or hated
in the BW-era: Mewtwo-EX (BW: Next Destinies
54/99, 98/99; BW: Black Star Promos BW45; BW:
Legendary Treasures 54/113). Its “X Ball”
attack requires [CC] to do 20 damage times the number of
Energy attached to all Active Pokémon, and for a while,
it defined competitive play. While it would have
still been a very good, perhaps even great, card if
Double Colorless Energy hadn’t been legal at the
time, our X Baller Brawler needs Energy
acceleration to do its thing. You could try to
manually power it up over two turns, but this was
a format with Pokémon Catcher pre-errata (it
worked like an Item based Lysandre); if your
opponent had a Mewtwo-EX ready first, yours was
feeling the pain. In fact, the general damage
output was such that a turn’s delay would rob Mewtwo-EX
of favorable Prize trades.
Then there is
another love/hate highlight for the Pokémon TCG world:
Night March. Yes, Lysandre’s Trump Card was
supposed to have balanced it out, so this time the
potency was not entirely intended, but without
Double Colorless Energy the deck just wouldn’t work;
all actual Night Marchers would need [CC] and only stuff
like Mew-EX copying Joltik (XY: Phantom
Forces 26/119) while Dimension Valley
was in play would retain the deck’s vaunted speed. Pumpkaboo
(XY: Phantom Forces 44/119) would be almost
totally worthless as an attacker. Yveltal-EX is
a bit like Mewtwo-EX; it would still be a strong
card without Double Colorless Energy, but not
as strong. Lugia-EX (XY: Ancient Origins
68/98, 94/98) takes a similar hit. Vespiquen (XY:
Ancient Origins 10/98) doesn’t work too well
requiring an added combo or an extra turn to get
swinging. Passimian rush decks are like Night
March and Vespiquen, relying exclusively (or
almost exclusively) on Double Colorless Energy.
So while many
(most?) of the cards I just listed are too strong for
their own good, at least a little broken in their own
right, one of the cards essential to this Double
Colorless Energy. So I consider Double
Colorless Energy to be broken, a card that
upsets the game balance. No, that doesn’t mean it
is a must-run for every deck; many decks don’t use it.
It isn’t even essential to all the decks I just
mentioned, just important for them performing as they do
now. Not all broken cards are equally unbalanced.
So don’t expect bizarre scores for the various formats,
just high scores for Standard, Expanded, Limited,
Legacy, and Theme Deck Formats. Yeah, I’m only
leaving out Unlimited because I’m still clueless, but
I’m better Double Colorless Energy still has a
place there.
Ratings
Standard:
4.25/5
Expanded:
4.25/5
Limited:
4.75/5
Theme:
4.75/5
Legacy:
4/5
Summary
Double Colorless
Energy
is may have a simple effect, but its effectiveness is
simply amazing. If you go back and read a lot of
older reviews, you’ll see me (and some other reviewers)
stressing how important it is to be “DCE-compliant” for
a card. Other forms of Energy acceleration like
Max Elixir have lessened this dependency, but I
cannot say it has been in a good way. The pacing
for the Pokémon TCG is already so fast that some of its
core mechanics are near impossible to properly balance
out, like Evolution; attack pricing not adjusting to
Double Colorless Energy even though it has been back
for seven years is one of the reasons why.
Of course, that
also means you better have a playset by now.
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