COTD – 23rd August 2011 – Cheren EP

Today’s Card of the Day is Cheren, a card being released in our upcoming Emerging Powers set just a matter of days from now.

This card comes in Supporter form and has a very simple effect stated on the card, Draw 3 Cards. This should immediately remind players of a card we already have in the format, Cheerleader’s Cheer, since it is ultimately the same, but your opponent doesn’t get that added bonus of drawing an extra card while you draw your three.

Cheren is going to be added to the fairly short list of cards we have for raw draw power at the moment, with the big alternative being Professor Juniper, or PONT if we are including shuffle-draw mechanics. As far as keeping your hand large and keeping what you have and still draw more is going to be fairly strong in this format and I can see it paired nicely with the two main Pokemon draw engines we currently have, Magnezone and Ninetales.

Both of these Pokemon feature in two of the top tier decks at the moment and allow the player to draw extra cards during their turn without having to use up a Supporter. I can see Cheren being used after the use of these kind of Poke Powers since it will let the player draw quite a decent amount of cards in a single turn, getting a considerable consistency advantage over the opponent. Just think that using ‘Roast Reveal’ to draw 3 cards and then using Cheren will allow you to draw 6 extra cards in just one turn, with the ability to use the same strategy in following turns throughout the game.

This kind of strategy has actually already been proved to be fairly successful, but in the form of the now outdated Cheerleader’s Cheer mentioned earlier. One of the players from Team Warp Point took a Reshiram/Typhlosion deck featuring 4 Cheerleader’s Cheer to the top 32 of US Nationals 2011 and that was with the opponent taking an extra card each time he played it. With the card changing to Cheren, things can only get better.

Overall, I can see Cheren being an outright replacement for Cheerleader’s Cheer, but it might also encourage players to use it in some of their decks since it doesn’t carry that disadvantage anymore. Raw drawpower is thin on the ground at the moment and maybe this could be one of the cards to aid consistency this format. I’m going to give it an average 6/10. It’s a very interesting card that is going to see some play, but since it can only work really well with Pokemon that draw extra cards, I can’t give it a higher score than this.

Artwork: Cheren is one of the main characters in the Pokemon Black and White games on the DS and this card obviously aims to mimic this as close as possible to the concept. You see Cheren in a pretty normal pose, standing in front of what looks like a 3D ‘route’ from the games. I personally think that they could have chosen a more iconic background for this one since he looks a little out of place just roaming a foggy woodland, but maybe they were just going for the ‘trainer in the wild’ feel to the image. I’m going to give it a 5/10, not the most interesting of artworks and I feel they could have done a little bit more with one of the more prevalent characters from the games.

Thanks for reading