- ↓ 11.00
- ꩜ 20.56
- ↑ 85.84
{G}{G} → Nerve Poison : 20
Flip a coin. If heads, the Defending Pokémon is now Paralyzed and Poisoned.
{C}{C}{C} → Hyper Needle : 70
Flip a coin. If tails, this attack does nothing. Either way, you can’t use this attack again as long as Koga’s Beedrill stays in play (even putting Koga’s Beedrill on the Bench won’t let you use it again).
illus. Ken Sugimori · LV.34
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Jamie
Hyper Needle. *Shakes head* Why?
Nerve Poison is pretty good though.
Curtis
This card isn’t properly balanced, as they’ve given Hyper Needle too many limitations. Its a 3 energy attack on a stage two that can only be attempted once. On top of that, it needs a coin flip to work, requires an extra energy that will be stuck on him until he’s KO’d, and, although it hits for very heavy for the time, still needs PlusPower to score a lot of its KOs. It should either hit for 120 and KO everything in the game at the time, or lose a colorless energy in its attack cost so it isn’t stuck there after attacking once.
MarxForever
When a card’s being balanced they didn’t just look at attack cost to damage output, other factors are taken into consideration as well, such as retreat cost, Health, the speed and power of it’s other attack option and even it’s pre-evolutions, along with possible combos (Hi Brock’s Ninetails). This Beedrill excels at pretty much all of these, while having decent health. Hyper Needle wasn’t meant to be a game winner for this card stand alone, more of a desperate measure. Also remember that any attack a Koga’s Pokemon does can poison through his trainer card, making PlusPower an inferior option in a Koga deck. Hyper Needle with Koga would do at least 80, an then what precious few things that could survive that would have to retreat or almost certainly be knocked out, and nothing with health that high had a Free Retreat Cost.
inatspong
I can see where that logic would come into play, but in order for a desperation play to be necessary, the other attack needs to be something you’d want to run a deck around. Koga’s own trainer makes the poison option for the first attack free, but 20 for 2 on a stage 2 doesn’t reward the heavy amount of setup required. I’ll give you that the then-high HP and free retreat are nice, but it isn’t enough to make him decent.