COTD – 31st August 2011 – Pichu HS

The last Card of the Day for August is going to be Pichu from the HeartGold SoulSilver Base Set.

At first glance, Pichu is a Baby Pokemon with 30HP, is of Lightning typing and has a single Poke Body and traditional free attack. Now everything is looking fairly familiar for a Baby Pokemon and it includes the standard ‘Sweet Sleeping Face’ Poke Body as well as having no weakness, no resistance and zero retreat cost which are all pretty nice to have.

Pichu’s only attack costs zero energy which is a good start and is called ‘Playground’. This attack allows you and your opponent to search through the deck and place as many Basics onto the bench as they like, as long as you don’t fill the 5 limit of course and after the attack is complete, Pichu falls asleep. Pichu falling asleep is always going to be great because you’ll avoid getting the early KO and what Playground does isn’t actually that bad, the only things is that it doesn’t become very helpful after turn one.

Using Pichu on your turn, the first of the game, means that you can collect your Basics along with your opponent, but they cannot evolve until the next turn since it would be there first. If it was their second turn, for example, they would be able to put Basics on the bench and evolve them as soon as it hit their turn, not good.

Pichu has actually been seen around in competitive play and most recently was used in the deck that came 2nd at Worlds this year, as I’m sure you all know. This Pokemon works really well in deck based around Basics that have low HP such as ones that rely on Vileplume. Because Oddish has just 40HP, it can get KO’d easily by Pokemon such as Yanmega before you get the chance to evolve, killing your chances at getting that trainer lock going. But if you use Pichu to grab multiple copies of Oddish and bench them, your opponent won’t be able to hurt your chances as badly if they do get the KO on one of your Oddish. This is the strategy that worked so well and managed to take the deck so far into the tournament.

Overall, Pichu is a pretty useful card, but only in decks that play multiple weak Basics and need to get them out fast, such as Vileplume. Having only 30HP makes it viable to Tyrogue-donks, but it does save you if you manage to use its attack before your opponent gets the chance. I’m going to give Pichu an average 4/10. It has a really useful attack for decks that rely on that turn one collecting of Basics, but otherwise it isn’t going to find much room in the metagame.

Artwork: Pichu has always been a happy-go-lucky Pokemon and this image clearly shows that he hasn’t changed one bit. I really like how the artist has really zoomed in on the Pokemon since it has made for a really energetic image where Pichu appears to be launching itself straight at the ‘camera’. Its huge smile really makes this a great image and it seems to be in some kind of traditional garden, roaming as a free wild Pokemon or maybe in some long grass waiting to be caught. Either way this image really shows off Pichu as a cute Baby Pokemon and I’m going to give it a really nice 8/10. The artist has done a nice job here.

Thanks for reading today’s Card of the Day!

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