Hey guys, Captain here with another Card of the Day (sure has been a while since I’ve written one of these)! So anyway, today’s card is Cubone from HS: Triumphant. This card came to my attention recently when I found out about a fun deck called “Cubone Rush”.
It’s actually a common card, and if you’ve opened any Triumphant packs then you’ve quite possibly gotten at least 1 but simply ignored it. Marowak is mostly known for being a cheap Lightning type counter if you can’t afford Donphan Prime. Oddly enough, Cubone probably has a lot more potential than Marowak.
Its stats are nothing special. 40 HP is low, water weakness isn’t too big of a deal, the lightning resistance is actually very nice, and 1 retreat cost is pretty standard and not too bad.
Its only attack, Bone Rush, costs 2 colorless energy (a bit unfortunate, though it can utilize Double Colorless Energy) and is one of those attacks that basically says “keep flipping coins until you flip tails”. In this case, you deal 20 damage for every heads.
Naturally, this makes it difficult to deal large amounts of damage, though you could supplement this with Pluspowers and the upcoming “flippy” Victini.
Right, but what’s the seller for this card? The attack is bad and so are most of its stats. However, there is one last thing: the Poke-Body. It states that damage dealt to Cubone (after weakness and resistance) is reduced by 20 for each Marowak in the discard pile. Suddenly, you can take a wimpy little common from Triumphant and turn it into a tank.
It shouldn’t be too hard to discard 3-4 Marowaks either, especially because of Junk Arm and Professor Juniper (maybe even Sage’s Training). The whole idea actually reminds me a bit of the Gyarados deck, where Gyarados would deal 30 damage for every Magikarp in the discard pile. It’s a shame Regice isn’t still around, but like I said, discarding a couple of Marowaks shouldn’t be too hard.
Anyway, if you successfully pull this off, you could have a Cubone that can prevent 80 damage per turn, and that’s not even counting Defender, resistance, or the upcoming Eviolite (which is a Tool that prevents 20 damage from a basic Pokemon). Seriously, with Defender and/or Eviolite, you could wall against a ton of powerful attackers in the format. And then with a single Potion, you can heal off all the damage on you!
I know I’m probably making Cubone sound like it’s actually really viable, but for the most part it’s not. It makes for a really fun deck as well as an interesting idea, but the damage output is too low for it to be particularly effective.
Don’t expect to win Cubone to win you any tournaments, but it can actually be a surprisingly effective counter to Yanmega/Magnezone or even MagneBoar. However it will get a lot stronger once Emerging Powers is released, and can be a very fun league deck (as well as being very cheap).
So overall I’d give Cubone a 2 out of 5. The damage output is low enough to where you can let a lot of decks set up without much of a hassle, though Cubone can tank damage pretty well. Like I said, don’t expect to win any tournaments with it, but you can definitely mess with some MegaZone players.
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