Welcome to today’s review of Skarmory from Undaunted. When translations of Skarmory were first released, it received a lot of attention because of its Energy acceleration attack, “Steel Coat”, which allows you to grab a Metal Energy from your deck and attach it to one of your Pokemon for M.
Obviously, the best factor of “Steel Coat” is in its wording, which clearly states that you’re allowed to grab Special Metal Energy as well as Basic ones. Apart from Energy Exchanger and Skarmory, there are very few ways to search out Special Energy from your deck.
The two decks that most commonly use Skarmory are Scizor Prime and Steelix Prime decks. Typically, they’ll run four copies to maximize the potential of starting with it. However, I’ve recently explored using Skarmory with Magnezone LV.X (with SF 5 being the Magnezone under it). In a perfect world, it would allow you to have a 140 HP Pokemon that can reduce damage done to it by 20-30 and retreats to the bench after each attack, making it very difficult to KO.
Skarmory’s second attack, “Razor Wing”, is a mere shadow compared to its first attack. For MCC, you get a low 40 damage with no special effect. I can tell you right now, out of 1,000 games, it would be uncommon to use it once; it’s just too weak of an attack to devote an extra two Energy to.
Skarmory has 80 HP, which should help to prevent it from being donked by anything but a Machamp. The Fire weakness isn’t too hurtful as the only commonly played Fire cards are Charizard and Blaziken FB, which will likely be able to OHKO it regardless. The -20 Psychic weakness helps to give it some durability and the retreat cost of one is average.
My Recommendation: Skarmory is a pretty nice card that not every deck can use, but in the ones that can, watch out. While playing it in Steelix and Scizor should be a no-brainer, I suggest trying it out in other decks as well and see what you come up with. With a card as flexible as this, there’s bound to be a lot of untapped combinations out there waiting to be discovered.
My Rating 3.75/5
