COTD – 14th June 2011 – Junk Arm TM

Today’s Card of the Day is Junk Arm from the Triumphant expansion. Upon this card’s release, it helped to bring Gyarados back into the competitive scene since its loss of Felicity’s Drawing from rotation. But we’re talking about HGSS-On now so let’s look at the card from that perspective.
Junk Arm allows you to discard two cards from your hand to grab a Trainer from the discard pile and put it into your hand, as long as that Trainer isn’t Junk Arm. Now in the HGSS-On format, this card is going to be in a numerous amount of decks simply because it is a very nice form of recovery, what we have very little of upon rotation.

Being able to grab already used cards such as Rare Candy gives you a lot more options during your turn in being able to search out Trainers that are hard to search out of the deck.
This card also has incredible synergy with two draw based supporters, Sage’s Training and Professor Juniper. Being able to select two cards from your next 5 is a great source of draw, but choosing 3 to throw away can be a tough choice. However, with the ability to get back extra cards you’ve chosen to get rid of with Junk Arm makes Sage’s Training even more useful. The same applies with Professor Juniper, but without giving you the choice to keep a Junk Arm in your hand for later use.
Junk Arm is going to be a very useful card in the next format with Yanmega and Magnezone Prime being top techs at the moment. The ability to cut your hand down to size to make Yanmega’s attacks free or draw more cards with Magnezone’s ‘Magnetic Draw’ makes this card even more versatile in builds including these two Pokemon.
Overall, Junk Arm is a very versatile card which is going to net us some decent recovery in the coming format. Due to the versatility and general usefulness of this card, I’m going to give it a solid 8/10. You are sure to find this card in many builds of new HGSS-On decks.

Thanks for reading and comment below as to what your score would be.