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{L}{L}{W}{W} → Thundersquall : 40
If your opponent has any Benched Pokémon, choose 1 of them and this attack does 10 damage to that Pokémon for each {W} Energy attached to Shining Raichu. (Don’t apply Weakness and Resistance for Benched Pokémon.)
· Shining rule: You can’t have more than 1 Shining Raichu in your deck.
illus. Hironobu Yoshida · LV.30
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If the electricity in its cheeks runs out, it sticks its tail straight up and uses it to collect energy from the air.
feyblade
Synergy with Dragon Blade’s Blend Energy WLFM.
Wait,why on earth are you using this horrible card in the unlimited format?!
Ambassador
I don’t think this card is horrible by any measure – I’m surprised by how potentially decent it is. How many other cards were able to to take advantage of Rain Dance to do additional Energy w/ {W} Energy attached but no cap on how much extra damage they could do? (N1 Lanturn comes to mind but this card is a bit easier to get into play.)
Ignis
Except for the fact that Raichu is not a {W} type, meaning Rain Dance does not work…
Ambassador
Trust me to forget the basics after spending some time looking up the intricacies.
Nonetheless, I really don’t think this is a bad card at all. I think you’d have to make it the main focus of your deck and build around it – so that if this card is prized you’d be pretty much SoL – but that kind of risk/reward is appealing, isn’t it? I’ve pretty readily found tons of examples of decks either built around this card (or else having techs built into the deck to counter it), here’s just a few;
https://archive.is/wip/spxut (Shining Raichu + Buzzap Electrode)
https://note.com/oroc/n/n7a75b48881cb (A brief perusal of the deck makes me think of it as a “neo-Haymaker” of sorts)
https://note.com/sudowoodo_poke/n/nbc7f1f500f90 (Shining Raichu + Buzzap Electrode + Misty’s Poliwhirl)
https://archive.is/wip/BVYol (scroll down for a brief blurb on a premise; Shining Raichu + Vending Ditto, lets you get around the “1 per deck” thing but you’d still be SOL if you can’t get Shining Raichu in play quickly enough)
With the caveat that a lot of these decks seem like a response to certain cards being unfeasible after the number of copies you can run gets capped by the Hall of Fame points system – so that after you filter out the cream of the crop, Shining Raichu is your next best guy. But bear in mind that it also doesn’t sound like these decks are trying to *force* Shining Raichu to work – it’s just working, and decently.
The pitfall of making a single copy card the main attacker of your deck is certainly there, but even at a quick glance, it looks like the old accepted wisdom that the Shining Pokémon cards weren’t good might’ve been off the mark. I think they deserve a reevaluation, with Shining Raichu being a, well, shining example of that.
Richard Rich
These Shining cards were the first time in the TCG we saw evolved Pokemon appear as “Basic.” In English, if I’m correct, we wouldn’t see this again until Metagross star (shiny Metagross) in 2005. https://pkmncards.com/card/metagross-star-delta-species-ds-113/
(Japan had the VS cards in 2001, which treated all evolved Pokemon as “Basic”)
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_VS_(TCG)
Felipe Onate
There were a couple of VS cards that released in English as league promos, as Rocket’s Scizor, so in theory we got to see other Basic versions of evolutions in between these two :P
https://pkmncards.com/card/rockets-scizor-best-of-game-4/