COTD – 30th July 2011 – Reshiram BW

My pick for today’s Card of the Day is Reshiram from the latest Black and White set.

At first glance, Reshiram packs quite a punch and when put into a deck, it really does live up to its potential. To start with, it has 130HP, massive for a Basic and two attacks.

The first is titled ‘Outrage’ and does a mediocre 20 damage for a Double Colourless, but its the small print you want to look at on this one. The text below reads that this attack does 20 damage plus 10 more for each damage counter on Reshiram. This is an incredibly powerful attack to have when not much out there is going to KO it in one go. Suffering any sort of damage will give this Pokemon the output it needs to do some serious damage to the defending Pokemon. This kind of attack can be seen used in the late game rather than earlier on after it has taken some damage from various attempts to KO it through the coarse of the game.

Reshiram’s second attack, ‘Blue Flare’ is the most powerful out of the two. For two Fire energy and a Colourless, it does 120 damage to the defending Pokemon at the cost of discarding two Fire energy. This attack has become the key element of the deck Reshiram/Typhlosion which can be found in The Testing Zone if you are looking for how to build it. The deck is focused on getting Blue Flare going turn after turn by getting the Fire energy you discard with the attack back onto the field via Typhlosion’s ‘Afterburner’ attack.

Not only does this strategy allow the player to keep 120 damage firing off every turn, but you are forced to add a single damage counter every time you use Typhlosion’s power. This sounds bad at first, but this actually adds fuel to Reshiram’s Outrage attack and can rack up some serious damage when used correctly.

So overall, Reshiram has become the centre of a deck that performed fairly well at US Nationals and is only going to improved upon through the release of cards such as Eviolite and Pokemon Catcher when we receive them from Japan. I’m going to give Reshiram a very nice 8/10 because it has huge HP, a great couple of attacks and can be put into an extremely competitive deck which can perform well.

Thanks for reading this card of the day and as ever, make sure you comment below what you think.