COTD – 12th July 2011 – Xatu UL

My Card of the Day for today is Xatu from HS: Unleashed.

This Stage 1 features two attacks, 90HP and is of Psychic typing. These are all fairly vanilla stats and it hasn’t seen much competitive play, however there is a decent use for this card which was recently portrayed at Canadian Nationals.

Xatu’s main role in the competitive environment is to counter Machamp Prime, a card that is set to see a fair amount of play in the future. ‘Psywave’ does 20 damage times the number of energy on the defending Pokemon for just a single Psychic energy. When using this against Machamp, they will usually have 4 energy loaded up to use ‘Champ Buster’, so a Psywave on a fully-powered Machamp will give you the OHKO you may desperately need due to double Psychic weakness.

This is a really effective way to get rid of those pesky Machamps if your deck is going to suffer in the matchup. However, Xatu is only going to be able to deal with that and not much else. It was included in the decklist for Ambipom/Weavile/Slowking that came 5th at Canadian Nats, but only as a 1-1 tech which was solely out to get Machamp. I feel that this was a strange choice myself, but on the day it seemed to work incredibly well when presented with the matchup. I guess it’s just down to player discretion.

Overall, this card is the only really solid counter we have to Machamp Prime, if your deck is struggling against that matchup, but I feel that it can only be slotted into some lists comfortably enough to not lose too much consistency. Personally, I’m going to give it a 4/10. It’s a decent counter, but I feel going for straight consistency will serve you better than having to tweak your list to fit this in. Try it out for yourself though if you are needing to deal with Machamps.

Thanks for reading and check back tomorrow!