Special guest COTD feature by Kenny Wisdom?! Oh lawd.
Today’s COTD is Dragonite FB from Supreme Victors. For those of you who are unaware, Dragonite has been used as a mirror-match tech in LuxChomp, and other SP variants, as Garchomp C is weak to it. It was most famously used in Yuta Komatsuda’s World championship-winning LuxChomp list. It’s main use is it’s Mach Blow attack, which for CCC can deal 20 damage, or 80 damage if the defending Pokemon is an SP. While this doesn’t seem like much to the untrained eye, in reality it’s huge.
Not only does 80 damage knock out almost any un-leveled SP, but it also KOs Garchomp C and Garchomp C LV.X, because of the aforementioned weakness. The hefty CCC energy cost is also reduced a bit considering it’s a valid target for Energy Gain, and any deck you’re playing it in is likely to be playing 4 DCE as well.
The real greatness of the card though, comes when looking at the LuxChomp vs. LuxChomp mirror match. I played that very match in a finals of a Battle Road last weekend, and I can say without a doubt that it was the Dragonite that lost me the game. Not because it KO’d my Pokemon, but because it’s the essential third threat on the board.
If you don’t have experience with SP or LuxChomp you might not be able to follow, and if so I apologize for that, but I’ll try to keep it simple. Essentially, when you have a Garchomp, you know it can be KO’d by an opposing Garchomp, or an Ambipom (if you have no energies, or the Ambipom has a belt). When these two are on the board, you have the choice of Dragon Rushing one of them, and hoping that the other one won’t get set up (won’t hit their DCEs, energy gains, level ups, etc.).
However, when Dragonite FB is on the board, you have three threats, one of which you can’t OHKO. When you’re staring at a bench of Dragonite FB, Garchomp C, and Ambipom G, you can be pretty assured that your Garchomp is going down.
Dragonite’s biggest flaw is that it has Colorless weakness, meaning that it’s likely to be OHKO’d in response to any KO it makes, by an opposing Dragonite or Garchomp. However, again, no matter what happens they have more threats on the board. Choosing to KO the Dragonite in that situation means you’re choosing to let the Garchomp or Ambipom live.
In short, if you’re playing LuxChomp and you’re not playing Dragonite you’ll likely lose to a list that does play Dragonite, in my opinion at least.
Thoughts?
