COTD – 29th August 2011 – Max Potion

Today’s Card of the Day on this English Public Holiday is Max Potion from the newest set to be released in just 2 days, BW: Emerging Powers.

This card is in the new Trainer-Item category introduced just after the release of the original Black and White Base Set and is actually one of the more exciting inclusions from the rather disappointing newest set.

So the text on the card reads, ‘Heal damage from 1 of your Pokemon. Then, discard all Energy attached to that Pokemon.’ This should jump out at the competitive player straight away considering the way the format looks at the moment.

Yanmega and Donphan are two stand-out Pokemon in the format right now and they are both really low energy attackers for some really high damage output. Yanmega attacks for free and Donphan only needs a single Fighting Energy to do 60 damage right away. The way this card pairs really well with these attackers is that these low energy attackers can be tough to one shot if you don’t have the type advantage, especially Donphan, so if it has been hit by an attack, in reach of a KO the next turn, you can go ahead and heal all the damage at a small energy cost. Since you have to discard the energy, you’ll only be losing one or zero energy to heal. This is really nice since the energy can be easily replenished in the same turn for Donphan and not much changes in the case of Yanmega.

In the case of other strong Pokemon in the format such as Reshiram, Zekrom and Magnezone, this card isn’t going to be the best inclusion. Since these Pokemon love holding energy on them for the majority of the game, a single Fire for Reshiram and a Lightning plus a Colourless for Magnezone, you really don’t want to be discarding them. The healing would be really nice since all the Pokemon mentioned have really high HP and won’t get OHKO’d very easily, but the cost of discarding those much needed energy to keep the hard hitting attacks coming is way to high for those kind of decks. So I can only really see this card working in decks like Stage One Rush predominantly.

Overall, this card is looking to one of the best cards in the newest set, coming second to the very popular Pokemon Catcher. It has a lot of versatile uses at the moment in a format that has a lot of high HP Pokemon in and can be reused with Junk Arm if ever needed more than once or twice. I’m going to give it a fairly average 6.5/10. It’s a great card in only a few decks such as Stage One Rush, but this exclusivity really does hurt the cards broader play ability.

Artwork: As I always say, Trainers are very hard to stay creative with since they are usually Items or just characters from the game that appear in the TCG to make some sort of a connection. This is exactly one of those cards and needs some insane creativity to get a high score, but unfortunately that really doesn’t happen here. This is just a 3-dimensional image of an item from the game paired with some fancy graphics on the ‘spray’ and gloopy purpleness in the background. The colours that have been chosen are actually really nice and may bump up the score by a single point since they did at least something right. There’s not much else to say about this art since it’s just a standard item. I’m going to give it a 4/10. They’ve done what they can with the item given, but an unexciting looking card otherwise.

Thanks for reading today’s COTD and check back tomorrow for the next one!