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- ↓ 4.92
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- ↑ 78.90
Poké-BODY ⇢ Keystone Seal
As long as Spiritomb is your Active Pokémon, each player can’t play any Trainer cards from his or her hand.
{@} → Darkness Grace
Search your deck for a card that evolves from 1 of your Pokémon and put it onto that Pokémon. (This counts as evolving that Pokémon.) If you do, put 1 damage counter on Spiritomb. Shuffle your deck afterward.
{D} → Will-o’-the-wisp : 10
illus. Aya Kusube · LV.39
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Anonymous
Best. Starter. Ever.
Quarter-Turn
Yeah, this card is ridiculous.
Whatever happened to 0-energy attacks?
WilliamH.
I miss zero-energy attacks!
Dark Kira
So, as Mega Evolutions use pretty much the same wording as any other Evolution, can you use Darkness Grace to Mega Evolve a benched Pokemon?
HEZ
Yep! ;)
Blob Takeshi
Spiritomb’s first ever Darkness card!
Whitmer 4 POTUS
This ability: broken!!!
Twylis
Broken indeed, but I actually love the thinking behind it. Evolution decks tend to be weaker than basic-focused decks due to being slower, so a good way to put evolutions on even footing is to slow the game down entirely by locking down items. Darkness Grace then accelerates the evolution process, creating a wonderful evolution-support package.
The thing is, this was printed at a time when evolution decks were already quite fast, thanks to Rare Candy and Broken Time-Space allowing evolutions to be played turn 1 anyway. And then Undaunted Vileplume came along to help Spiritomb establish a horrible turn 1 lock situation that doesn’t necessarily require you to play any cards first. Still, quite lovely from a card design standpoint!
Twylis
Thinking about how one might balance this card for modern formats. I’m thinking no ability, with an attack as follows:
(C): Search your deck for a card that evolves from 1 of your Pokémon and put it onto that Pokémon. If you do, your opponent can’t play any Item cards during their next turn.
Circumvents the turn 1 item lock issue by putting the effect on an attack, and the lock is conditional on evolving a Pokémon so it can’t be used indefinitely for the entire game. Keeps the original card’s premise of slowing down the game to allow evolutions to flourish, and doesn’t break anything the way, say, Broken Time-Space would.
Varna
This game would benefit from Turn 0 No Items for this format. Way too much nonsense item spam, between vip pass, all the switches for comfey, electric generator, cram-o-matic, etc etc etc. You can’t remove the ability from this and have it be any good – because that lock is the primary thing that slows these problematic strategies down.