COTD – 24th August 2011 – Lost Remover

Hey everybody, my choice for today’s Card of the Day is going to be another trainer in the form of Lost Remover from our Call of Legends set.

This card hasn’t seen a lot of play recently. It did feature in a few decks including a very interesting DialgaChomp with 3 Lost Remover that springs to mind from last format, but other than that, it hasn’t really seen much play in the transition to HGSS-On.

What this card does is allow you to choose a Special Energy card attached to one of your opponent’s Pokemon and send it to the Lost Zone. Now when we’re talking about Special Energy, we are referring to cards such as Double Colourless, Rescue, Rainbow and Special Dark/Metal energy and the first three on that list are actually seeing quite the bit of play at the moment.

I personally feel that this card could be very useful in today’s decks, since quite a few of the top tiers utilise a special energy card of some kind. The deck that would suffer most to the Lost Zoning of a Special Energy would include Stage One Rush, because of the high dependence on Double Colourless, Donphan and Dragons for the same reason, Yanmega/Magnezone, since they usually utilise Rainbow and any other decks that utilise Rescue Energy for Yanmegas or other attackers such as Mew Prime.

The big target of this would have to be Double Colourless, since it denies your opponent from 2 counts of energy, severely depleting their damage cost coverage, but it could also leave hefty Pokemon such as Zekrom or Zoroark in the active spot with not much to do. If Zoroark is there just copying attackers, relying on it’s DCE to retreat when needed, then you can Lost Remover their energy and catch them off guard with them scrambling another way to retreat, hopefully forcing an extra energy drop.

However, the amount of top tiers using this kind of energy is depleting and I personally feel that most decks will be able to function without a single copy of their Special Energy, or they will be able to play around it. There aren’t many decks at all out there that solely rely on Special Energy so the card just isn’t strong enough to include in every deck, but it can find it’s uses to slow the opponent down in such situations as mentioned above.

Overall, this card can be very useful, but is also very situational. Denying your opponent of 2 energy at once can be slightly annoying, but I don’t think it’s going to be too hard to recover from since they will usually have other means to adjust with. I’m going to give it a fairly low 4/10. Good card with some potential, but in the current format, there just isn’t enough Special Energy around to warrant an inclusion.

Artwork: I actually feel the artwork in this trainer is very nice. Some may question how a very spooky looking necklace manages to deprive Pokemon of their Special Energy, but that kind of adds to the mystery of it. Just a little bit of random info, did you know that in the card Seeker, the hooded figure is wearing one of these round his neck? (look closely at the image to the right) This certainly enhances the item’s mysterious aura since it seems to be some kind of evil relic which aids the hooded figures of the Pokemon world to capture all Special Energy, but maybe that’s just my imagination going a bit too far. However, I do like the way they’ve portrayed the item in this one and it’s pretty cool how they’ve linked it between cards. The colours certainly do make the trainer look ‘dark’ and those extra swirls of white give it a ‘cold’ sort of feeling to it. I’m going to give it a very nice 7/10.

Thanks for reading and please comment below what you think!