COTD – 2nd September 2011 – Zoroark BW

Today’s Card of the Day is going to be Zoroark from the Black and White Base Set. This Pokemon was one of the first to be revealed from the whole of the newest generation and has found a nice slot in competitive play at the moment.

At first glance, Zoroark is a Stage 1 Dark type Pokemon with 100HP, two attacks and a fairly nasty Fighting Weakness. It also has a single retreat cost which isn’t too bad, so what made this Pokemon good enough to be in the 2nd place US Nationals 2011 list? Let’s have a look.

Zoroark’s first attack isn’t as popular as its second and is called ‘Nasty Plot’. For a single Darkness Energy, you can search your deck for any card you please and place it into your hand. Now this attack is actually nice if you are running a deck that focuses on Dark energy or even Rainbow since it can grab you that very card you need to get out of a bad hand, such as PONT or something else of use. The downside to this card is that if your opponent feels you’ll get too much of an advantage from what you grab, they could force you to shuffle it back in with cards like Judge. This can get annoying since the attack doesn’t do any damage at all and is probably why the second attack gets more attention.

‘Foul Play’ is Zoroark’s second attack and is why this card is so good in competitive play right now. For a Double Colourless you can choose an attack on the defending Pokemon and effectively copy it along with any effects that it comes with. This attack is a perfect counter to those huge attackers such as Reshiram and Zekrom sicne Zoroark is able to copy those attacks for a smaller energy cost and be able to OHKO those Pokemon when paired with a PlusPower too. This kind of attack does have its downsides though when faced with a Pokemon that really doesn’t have any great attacks like most Basics or even Babies such as Cleffa where you’d be forced to put yourself to sleep. This is probably Zoroark’s biggest problem and could be a reason for it to see drop in play if Reshiram drops in play also since it wouldn’t really have any other targets for Foul Play apart from Zekrom, which damages itself.

You can see Zoroark be predominantly used in decks such as Stage One Rush since that deck focuses on countering pretty much everything in the meta in one deck. Zoroark is there for the reasons mentioned above, but could it be replaced by the likes of Cincinno who can output a pretty high amount of damage even when faced with Basics which Zoroark lacks. What I should also mentioned is that Zoroark has that versatility of just using DCE which means it can be easily slotted into decks that already utilises it, but Cincinno also shares that attribute, so it’s going to come down to player discretion.

Overall, Zoroark is a really powerful Pokemon if you are expecting to face a lot of Reshiram and/or Zekrom during your time playing it, but at any other time you should probably go with something else like Cincinno mentioned above. I’m a big fan of Stage One Rush at the moment and this is one of those Pokemon that really makes the deck. I’m going to give it a pretty generous 6.5/10. If I reviewed this before Emerging Powers came out, it would be a lot higher, but I think we’re going to see a lot less play of Reshiram which it counters so well.

Artwork: So for artwork, we are currently looking at the one from the set, but there is also a Promo version which I think looks much better which you can get from the Black and White Collection Box released a while back now. This is another one of those cards where a stock image has been used a placed onto a block colour background to make a cool holographic card, so there isn’t going to be a whole load to say about this card really. What I do like about this card is that they’ve given it a bit of originality with the mysterious wisps of smoke surrounding it giving it quite the ominous look about it. This will bump its score up by at least a point because it’s not just been placed on a plain background as we have seen previous cards done before. I’m going to give the artwork a nice 6/10.

Thanks for reading today’s Card of the Day and please vote below with the star system to get your say on how the card performs in competitive play!