Roller Skater – Cosmic Eclipse Pokemon Review

Vince

Roller Skater from SM Cosmic Eclipse is a Supporter card which makes you discard a card in order to draw 2 cards. But if you discarded a Basic Energy card from your hand, then you draw 4 cards instead of two. I don’t recall how often it saw any play, but I think it was a decent card when it came out. Most likely, you would want to reap the maximum effect to be worthwhile. I recall briefly mentioning Roller Skater last week when comparing against Hau to see if this Supporter is better or not. Roller Skater also takes me back to another card from almost a decade ago. Engineer’s Adjustments from HS Unleashed also had a similar effect like Roller Skater, such that you had to discard an Energy card from your hand in order to draw 4 cards. This seemed to be one of the best straight draw based supporter cards in 2010 due to destroying the competition, outclassing Emcee’s Chatter, Cheerleader’s Cheer, and/or Bill. It wasn’t until four sets later, in Black & White, that Professor Juniper debuted and was the go-to Supporter card for all your drawing needs, even if you had to discard your entire hand for it. Which isn’t to say that Engineer’s Adjustments is useless, it just makes sense to use the stronger effect over existing ones.

Back to Roller Skater, she may have a few minutes to shine, but not after the next after Cosmic Eclipse that we had Professor’s Research in Sword & Shield. However, I have to stress that players should mind what they’re discarding. Professor cards aren’t the answer to every situation from a variety of decks. It isn’t the card that makes me go “Wow, this card is so powerful, I gotta put all 4 copies in this deck”. Roller Skater might not have any drawbacks if you can actually get back what you’ve discarded. If I discard, say, a Basic Metal Energy when using Roller Skater, and I have Metal Saucer in my hand, not only I get to draw 4 cards, but I can get back my Metal Energy as well as fueling up certain attacks. I could say the same thing to Engineer’s Adjustments involving Basic Dark Energies so that Dark Patch can recover and accelerate energies for attacks. That’s the kind of thinking that sometimes mitigate what would’ve been discarded – and ocassionally be hard to retrieve. Professor related cards is a different story; you would have to dump everything and hope you have some recovery cards to get them back, and sometimes you might not be able to due to item lock. Roller Skater is a low risk, low to medium reward.

I felt more comfortable using cards like Roller Skater and Coach Trainer for those mid-powerful draws without too much of a cost than to mindlessly play Professor cards and hope for the best. I still play Professor related cards, but not more than 2 copies of them for when I’m absolutely sure that I’m giving up my hand. When it comes to deck building, I’m actually pretty conflicted; there are some decks that go all out and have little to no recovery cards while there are others whose every single card matters. On another note, if Roller Skates from XY didn’t ask for a coin flip, every deck would run 4 of those since it could draw 3 cards without using up your Supporter of your turn!

Ratings:

• Standard: 3/5
• Expanded: 2.5/5
• Limited: 4.5/5
• Theme: 4.75/5

Otaku

Roller Skater (SM – Cosmic Eclipse 203/236, 235/236) is a Trainer-Supporter has three effects:

1. Discard a card from your hand
2. If you discarded anything for Step 1, draw two cards.
3. If the card you discarded for Step 1 was an Energy, draw two more cards.

This might be useful if you need to draw without shuffling away your hand or discarding more than one card, and a yield of four cards is still acceptable.  I went through all the tournament results – where Roller Skater was legal – available on LimitlessTCG and found no decks containing even one copy of Roller Skater.  They don’t have a list for every deck used in every age bracket for every tournament, so it is possible someone somewhere used Roller Skater reasonably well, but probably not.

In the Limited Format, Roller Skater is most welcome, but that is true of draw power and Supporters in general here.  Drawing won’t help you win the game directly, but it helps you get the cards that will.  Depending exactly on what else you pull and run, you may have an easier or harder time covering the discard cost with an Energy card.  Roller Skater is in the “Unseen Depths” Theme Deck.  In the PTCGO’s Theme Format, the deck isn’t among the competitive top tier, but it is still a competent deck by current standards.  Roller Skater compliments some of the other cards in the deck, though nothing makes for a spectacular combo.

Roller Skater’s best use may be in teaching.  More complicated to play than a card like Hop, but easier on a new player than Cynthia, Professor’s Research, etc.  Those are better cards competitively, but it can be very hard for a novice to know when to hold onto their hand or go for the big draw.  If we want to get very detailed, Roller Skater could even be used to help explain things like “costs” versus “effects”, “Do as much as you can.” versus “You cannot play a card for no effect.”  Etc.

Ratings

• Standard: 2/5
• Expanded: 2/5
• Limited: 3/5
• Theme: 4/5

Roller Skates isn’t the best option for any deck right now, but if you use it, it can do the job… just not as well as the next-best options (Cynthia, Marnie, and Professor’s Research).  Just as Hop really needed to draw four (instead of three), Roller Skater’s own draw yield seems a bit low.  I can’t even say that it is clearly a better version of Juggler, a 17-year-old Supporter that let you discard one basic Energy to draw three cards, or two to draw five.  It may be a pet peeve, but I also wish its effect did something with Roller Skates, an Item-card from the XY-era.

Note: The original version of this review neglected to cover Roller Skater in the Theme Format.  Several other significant revisions were made, though the scoring for Formats other than the Theme Format remain unchanged.