COTD – 12th August 2011 – Teddiursa CL

For those of you that aren’t lucky enough to be Grinding into Worlds today, here’s my Card of the Day, Teddiursa from the Call of Legends set.

Oddly enough, this was one of those random common cards we didn’t receive in any of the HS sets, so it was placed in here to fill out the Call of Legends ‘filler’ set before we received our first Black and White set, so what does this card bring us?

Well, Teddiursa is a Colourless Basic Pokemon with 50HP, just one attack and a single retreat cost. So at first glance it doesn’t look great, but what makes Teddiursa so special is that it actually featured in the winning deck of Junior 2011 US National Champion Xander Pero, in his rogue concoction of Vileplume/Ursaring/Roserade which took the division by storm.

Teddiursa’s first and only attack ‘Fake Tears’, costs just a Colourless Energy and forces you to flip a coin. If that coin is tails, the attack does nothing, but if you manage to hit heads, your opponent cannot play any trainer cards next turn and any damage done to Teddiursa during the next turn is reduced by 30. A 50% chance of taking away your opponent’s trainer privileges the next turn was key to Xander’s winning strategy while he was setting up a Vileplume to further the lock for the duration of the whole game and effectively having 30 more HP means that Teddiursa will even survive a Yanmega’s ‘Sonicboom’ onslaught.

With only the one attack, there isn’t a whole load you can say about this Pokemon, but Fake Tears really can slow your opponent down, even if you only hit the one heads and then evolve up to the beast that is Ursaring the next turn. The deck it was used in really did hold an amazing strategy and maybe you should try it out for your next Battle Roads coming up soon!

Overall, this Pokemon can deal some fairly hefty blows to the strategy if it goes first and hits heads, but the flip factor is always there and doesn’t by any means make it the modern day Spiritomb AR! But saying that, this is the next best thing and could be seen in a fair few rogue decks in the future so I’m going to give it a fair 5/10. An interesting card with limited uses, but those uses have proven to be able to stand up to the metagame.

Artwork: As for artwork, this one is actually fairly plain. We have Teddiursa looking fairly lost or astonished at something it has seen in those dark woods surrounding him in the background. I think he looks fairly big in comparison to the trees, unless the trees are especially small, but the colours do set off the Pokemon fairly nicely. I’m going to give it a 4/10. Not anything special to see here, but what they did works in its own simplistic way.

Thanks for reading today’s COTD, good luck to all of you at Worlds and I hope you have a great weekend!