COTD – 9th August 2011 – Shaymin UL

My choice for today’s Card of the Day is Shaymin from the HS: Unleashed set.

At first glance, Shaymin comes in Basic form, has Grass typing, 70HP, a single attack and a Poke Power. Just looking at the card it looks pretty basic, but any card with a Poke Power is worth reading in my opinion.

First off, let’s look at its attack since that’s the least exciting part of the card. ‘Energy Bloom’ costs a Grass Energy and a Colourless, which isn’t too bad, for 30 damage and the small print tells us that we can heal 30 damage from any Pokemon on our side of the field with energy attached. Now this attack really isn’t as bad as it seems. There could be some far out situation where you could make full use of this, but if you end up attaching energy manually for this, you are definitely wasting your time.

Where Shaymin excels is its Poke Power. ‘Celebration Wind’ activates when you place Shaymin from the hand to your bench and allows you to move all energy attached to your Pokemon to any of your other Pokemon. This Power can come in very useful when you are expecting a KO on a costly attacker, so that you can move all the energy to another one, saving the energy you took the time to attach.

Shaymin has most prominently been a part of Zekrom, a deck that can reach 120 damage in one turn, which I’m sure you’ve already heard about. Shaymin is the key ingredient to this little formulae to get that turn one damage, since it lets you move all those energy onto Zekrom and make it the powerful attacker it can be in 2 less turns than usual. It can also help with the issue above where you are close to facing a KO, where you can utilise Celebration Wind to prepare a fresh attacker for the next turn, ready to take that return prize.

Overall, Shaymin is a very good Pokemon in decks that run energy-heavy attackers, but since the Power can only be used once unless you run Seeker or SSU, it’s going to be a pain in the bench later on, possibly becoming a free prize for any Reversal(Catcher)/Yanmega combo. I’m going to give Shaymin 6/10. This guy has created an archetype of the current format so it can’t get a low score, but only being able to be used in a handful of decks means that its score just can’t be too high.

Artwork: The artwork on this card is very… random, to say the least. Unleashed seemed to be a set featuring a lot of this ‘futuristic tunnel’ background imaging and is puzzling to me where they are supposed to be. What makes things weirder is that there is a random Eevee seemingly following Shaymin in this space tunnel, giving the impression the Shaymin is beating it in some kind of race?! It’s anybody’s guess where they may be, but I must say that it makes for a great holo and Shaymin is looking pretty awesome up the front there, beating Eevee at whatever they are doing. I’m going to give it a soild 7/10. The randomness of the background here really works somehow and the blue-ish tinge to it makes for a great holographic card. The random Eevee is questionable, but overall, a solid image.

Thanks for reading today’s COTD and please comment below what you think