COTD – 13th June 2011 – Mandibuzz BW

Today, I’ve chosen Mandibuzz as my card of the day from the newest Black and White expansion. Mandibuzz is a Stage 1 Pokemon with a fairly average 90HP and two attacks. The first, Blindside is probably the most useable of the two with the ability to do 50 damage to any of your opponent’s Pokemon with damage counters already on them. Now, since Crobat G is gone this card isn’t as powerful, but there are still many ways to get this guy sniping for some fairly high damage. Absol Prime, Tyranitar Prime and Kingdra Prime have all been suggested as partners for this card and all of them are pretty good, but with their own flaws.
Absol’s Poke Body ‘Eye of Disaster’ forces your opponent to place 2 damage counters on each Pokemon they place on the field as long as Absol is active. This is obviously a good starter for a possible deck seeing as you can get damage on the field really early while setting up Mandibuzz on the bench, this will give you some great targets for Blindside.
The same strategy applies through Tyranitar and Kingdra by being able to use ‘Darkness Howl’ and ‘Spray Splash’ to add damage around the board to keep sniping your opponent’s bench before they can get anything going.
The single Darkness energy cost for this attacks is also a very nice plus.
Mandibuzz’s second attack, Punishment can also be very handy. Costing just a Dark energy and a Double Colourless means that you can get it set up in a couple of turns and it allows you to do 40 damage plus 60 more if your target is a Stage 2. 100 damage is nothing to shy away from since this brings a lot of Pokemon into one-hit KO range and even more so if using the above Pokemon mentioned earlier. Not to mention it will also one-hit KO Gengar Prime in an instant.
Overall, this is a very interesting card that has a fair few partners to test out. Since it has a lot of options and a fairly nice resistance to Donphan and Machamp, I’m going to give Mandibuzz a 7.5/10. The same score as Lanturn from a previous day, but that’s because I can see it having the same sort of potential in a possibly successful rogue idea.

Hope you liked this fairly lengthy COTD and, as ever, comment below what your score would be.

Dan