COTD – 30th August 2011 – Pokegear 3.0

Today’s pick for my Card of the Day is PokeGear 3.0 from our HeartGold SoulSilver Base Set.

As you can see, this card is a trainer and the text reads that we can look at the next 7 cards of our deck, choose a Supporter we find there and place it into our hand, shuffling our deck afterwards. Now searching for Supporters is something that we really don’t have at the moment, but was a predominant part of last format, making for quite the change, but this card gives us this sort of search.

However, this card is a lot more luck based and gets more successful when taking into account how many of each Supporter you choose to run in your deck. For example, if you’re looking for a Pokemon Collector and know you have 4 left in your deck, you know that there is maximum chance possible of hitting one, not taking into account the amount of cards in the deck etc, sicne we would be getting into some complex maths

This card is actually being used in competitive play right now to help you to find Supporters when in a ‘drought’ in a game. When you are already running a maxed out line of something (e.g Professor Oak’s New Theory) this card can kind of give you a ‘fifth copy’ by making your hand more workable than it once was. This doesn’t mean that you can use 5 PONTs in a game, but it does mean that when you draw PokeGear, you can kind of turn it into a PONT if you hit one in your top 7, quite likely if you run four.

However, the luck aspect of this card is really going to hurt its score since it really can’t be a definite solution to a dead hand since it can fail from time to time. A plus to this is that it can be reused with Junk Arm later in the game if needed, but wouldn’t you rather be searching out another Catcher or something else to save fishing for a Supporter that you don’t need, or may not even be there?

Overall, this card is seeing some play in the competitive world since it helps you to turn dead hands into useful ones with some luck of the draw. It can be used with Junk Arm if needed again to make a really crucial move, but the luck can damped this cards chance of seeing regular play. I’m going to give it a fairly average 5/10. Just a bit too luck based for me, but it does work well in decks that run a lot of Twins since it can fish them out when you most need them, or can grab you those key shuffle-draw Supporters when in a tight spot. Pokegear 3.0 will see some limited use.

Artwork: I’ve gone and picked another trainer today, so the artwork section isn’t going to be great, however this one does make a difference to others since it has a more interesting background. In previous COTDs such as yesterday’s we’ve seen items in the game turned into an image with a solid background colour, but this one has a kind of map-style background which fits in with the Pokegear’s use in the video game. It seems to resemble one of the region maps that you are constantly referring too in the game and I think that gives it a really nice touch other than the easy option of putting a solid colour background in there. The item itself is pretty standard art for Pokemon items, but it has been given a pretty nice paintbrush-style outline which helps it to blend in better with the background, which is a really nice touch. I’m going to give this art a 7/10. Much better than some of the other trainers we’ve seen on previous COTDs.

Thanks for reading and let me know what you think of this card below!