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Switch (Celestial Storm CES 147)
Switch your Active Pokémon with 1 of your Benched Pokémon.
You may play as many Item cards as you like during your turn (before your attack).
Illus. Hiromichi Sugiyama
Celestial Storm — 147/168 — Uncommon
Cassie
New player here… can anyone tell me why Switch is a viable card? Is it just because it gets passed the Retreat cost?
Otaku
Switch is (usually) a viable card for at least three reasons which is really one: you’re not retreating at all!
1) You get a single manual retreat from the Active position per turn; Switch doesn’t use it up.
2) You do indeed usually have to discard Energy in order to manually retreat; Switch spares you this cost.
3) You usually are unable to manually retreat while a Pokémon is Asleep or Paralyzed; Switch doesn’t care about such things.
Perhaps it is not as obvious with Escape Board in the metagame; most decks using Escape Board are smart enough to use it on Pokémon with a single Energy Retreat Cost, so you get two-ish of the three above benefits. You’re still out your manual retreat for the turn, but you avoid discarding Energy and aren’t trapped by Paralysis or Sleep. There are other card effects that can prevent you from manually retreating, however, and still having a manual retreat available lends itself to combos.
One of the reasons Special Conditions aren’t too big of a deal is that you can shake them by Switching into something with a free Retreat Cost, then manually retreat to promote the original Active back up front. Same trick lets you shake other attack effects, including ones like “This Pokémon cannot attack during your next turn.”, even when it originates from that Pokémon’s own attack!
Cassie
Ah, that makes perfect sense! Thanks, Otaku!