Gardevoir & Sylveon-GX – Unbroken Bonds
Date Reviewed: May 21, 2021
Ratings Summary:
Standard: 1.50
Expanded: 2.00
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is horrible. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Vince
We’re almost done with the Sylveon week! Today, we’ll be looking at a card that is still Standard legal, but will soon leave the format: Gardevoir & Sylveon-GX from SM Unbroken Bonds. This was the 9th best card of the set, and at that time I was extremely biased about Sylveon cards. Time for me to be serious.
Gardevoir & Sylveon-GX is a TAG TEAM Basic Fairy type with 260 HP, Metal weakness, Darkness resistance, a retreat cost of CC, and three attacks. Fairy Song costs a single Fairy energy and lets you search your deck for up to two fairy energies to any of your Benched Pokemon. Kaleidostorm costs YYC for 150 damage and it lets you reorganize your Pokémon’s energy attachments. Magical Miracle costs YYY for 200 damage, but if you have three extra Fairy energies attached to it, your opponent shuffles their entire hand into their deck.
Looking at search results at Limitless, decks that used Gardevoir & Sylveon-GX were either by themselves or accompanied by other Pokémon supporting them or to find certain workarounds. Lugia-GX appeared in most decklists for the sole purpose of its Lost Purge-GX attack, banishing your opponent’s Active Pokemon and all cards attached to it, possibly removing problematic obstacles in their way. For expanded, Aromatisse XY has the Fairy Transfer ability which lets you reorganize Fairy energies without the reliance of Kaleidostorm doing its thing.
Due to the pandemic last year, there were no further data of how they would fare, with the recent tournament that used Gardevoir & Sylveon-GX was a special event at Lima, Peru. Not sure if the Sword & Shield expansion was legal to use at that time, but that deck actually won that event. With Zacian-V and a slew of Metal based support that debuted on Sword & Shield, I doubt Gardevoir & Sylveon would be able to keep up, on top of these changes implemented in the Pokémon TCG. I guess this is where they start to see major decline. The Fairy type is no longer supported, so no Pokémon from the Sword & Shield series will be weak to Fairy. The players may try to use whatever’s left in the Sun & Moon series, but the only notable card that involves the Fairy type is Wondrous Labytinth (*), which increase the attack cost of C of non-Fairy Pokemon. I personally think this archetype won’t be able to be resurrected.
Ratings:
Standard: 1.5/5 (Soon to be N/A)
Expanded: 2/5
On my personal top X cards lost to rotation, I did not have this card on my list because there were many other great cards between SM Team Up to SM Cosmic Eclipse that we would miss more. Much like Sylveon-GX, they enjoyed competitive success in their time.
Trivia: Currently I have 18 copies of Gardevoir & Sylveon-GX (3 alternate art, 3 Rainbow rare, 2 full art, and 10 regular). It’s possible that I would continue collecting them, but it seems hard to do at the moment.
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