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- ↓ 49.98
- ꩜ 74.39
- ↑ 89.99
{C}{C}{C} → Slam : 30×
Flip 2 coins. This attack does 30 damage times the number of heads.
{D}{D}{C}{C} → Trample : 50
For each Benched Pokémon in play (yours and your opponent’s), flip a coin. If heads, this attack does 30 damage to that Pokémon. (Don’t apply Weakness and Resistance for Benched Pokémon.)
illus. Hironobu Yoshida · LV.54
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Its body can’t be harmed by any sort of attack, so it is very eager to make challenges against enemies.
Mantidactyle
Obvious combo with Unown D from the same set, though it was too slow to be effective…
Ambassador's Challenge #2 (#1 was Mail from Bill)
To make a much, much, much longer post as short as possible, WOTC probably mistranslated Unown D, and it looks like the “Tyranitar+Unown D” combo probably did not exist in Japan. However,
· This card got a spiritual reprint as SM6b Tyranitar (i.e. CES Tyranitar for the English edition).
· All cards that got spiritual reprints in SM6b can be assumed to be cards that saw play and some degree of success in some format.
· Therefore, N2 Tyranitar must have been viable, in some format, and without Unown D.
My question is: what format, and what deck? I haven’t found anything. It’s not solely a question of age, because we’ve ultimately been able to find answers for most of the other cards from the Neo era that got SM6b reprints, but whether you Bing, Google, Ask Jeeves or otherwise, the JP internet is not offering any information up.
So it’s up to you! Come up or find with a way this card was significant to some meta that was supported in Japan and it was legal for. Possible leads:
· Transparent Walls (not the whole story, but probably part of it)
· Brock’s Ninetales (unlikely, feels like SM6b wouldn’t print Tyranitar if that is how it make sense)
· Baby Pokémon were banned in some formats (not sure that hurts or helps – aren’t they the main target of Trample’s 30 damage spread?)
· You can either assume the Hall of Fame star system is in place, or Hall of Fame cards are banned outright (the latter will be less convincing, but I’ll take what I can get!)
· Any combos from Base through e-Card are fair game so long as you can contextualize them in a given format
Not sure if anyone’s as interested in SM6b and the history of these cards as I am, but uhh anyone who comes up with the best answer will win my being very impressed with them :)))???
Twylis
The attack’s ability to OHKO benched babies is probably the key here, coupled with the 70 damage to the active (50 + the bonus damage from Darkness) which would OHKO most popular basic attackers, especially notable if it saw play alongside Base Set Hitmonchan. Which it probably would, since I can’t imagine it working without Double Colorless Energy in the format, and Pokémon Breeder also helps get it into play faster.
Ambassador
It sounds so shaky to me.
– To get Tyranitar in place you want Pokémon Breeder, 2 Darkness Energy, and DCE.
– To keep Tyranitar in place, you probably need to be running No Removal Gym (at minimum?)
– To start using Trample, you are probably running Transparent Walls or Scoop Up.
– To *keep* using Transparent Walls and Scoop Up, you need Nightly Garbage Run and you need to make sure they’re in your hand most (if not all) turns you want to use Trample.
All this and your opponent can still introduce a 50/50 to stop Trample from working at all by putting a Baby Pokémon in the Active Spot, and you’re in a situation where you probably don’t want to run babies at all in case you do have a turn where you don’t have Transparent Walls in your hand. Maybe you’re just running a light bench in general, both to keep self-inflicted Trample damage light, and to cap an opposing Sneasel‘s Beat Up. (But any off-turn still risks 30 damage to a second Tyranitar you’re setting up on the Bench…)
Can it work?
Ambassador
I think I made a crucial flaw in my assumptions. The Tyranitar+Unown D combo as we knew it in the EN TCG couldn’t exist in the JP TCG, but that doesn’t mean the Tyranitar+Unown D combo couldn’t exist.
I was staring at cards in Neo Discovery and was thinking to myself, “isn’t Unown F kind of ridiculous? Why would you bother to have Unown F, I, N, and D on your bench just to be able to seek out any Trainer card you might need?” The answer would probably be when you were running a convoluted deck like the one I’m trying to conceive of from scratch.
And this new concept immediately gave me a hit on Google. I present to you… Tyranitar FIND.
http://blog.livedoor.jp/aqwsderft/archives/25209377.html || https://archive.ph/wip/oBs2U
While the author of this article note that they themselves tried using the deck to middling success back in the day, I nonetheless think they were onto something here. Unown D eliminates the need for Invisible Walls, and the deck’s remaining high-maintenance needs can be serviced by Unown F’s Trainer search. The build strikes me as clunky after all, but I believe the core of it is on point – Tyranitar+FIND was probably a powerful combo. Much to my chagrin, Tyranitar+Unown D is probably the most crucial part of that combo after all.
Twylis
Honestly I can’t conceive of this card ever being genuinely *good*, but it can definitely be decent in a favorable meta, and with sufficient luck on the flips, I could see it making a memorable splash in a tournament or two.
I think part of why it was chosen is because they wanted SM6b to have some gen 2 stage 2 representation, and this was simply as good as gen 2 ever really got in that department.
Anonymous
Not sure if it was played in Japan at the time, but Jason Klaczynski has a Base-Neo Tyranitar/Brock’s Ninetales deck on his blog. I have seen someone playing a similar list in of Hall of Fame within the past few months, but as for how widely it was played in its historical context, I honestly cannot say.
https://jklaczpokemon.com/base-to-neo-decks/#brocks-ninetales-tyranitar
Jack
Man, sometimes I wish there was a client like PTCGO/PTCGL that supported Unlimited play so stuff like that could be playtested and so on. I remember Jason dominating the game for a period as well. I didn’t play competitively until late EX / early DP era, but I’d have LOVED to have played WotC era cards competitively, just for the fun of it.
Anon
it exists, it’s called TCG ONE
Mike
You can playtest cards using Tabletop simulator (available on Steam). Just go on YouTube and search “Playing Pokemon TCG in Tabletop Simulator – Start Here” and youll be on your way :)
Anonymous
There is a website called TCGONE where people play many Wizards of the Coast era Pokémon formats, along with Worlds formats from 2004 to 2008 and from 2013 to 2019. New sets stopped being added at Chilling Reign so the few remaining volunteers could focus on bug fixes and adding older formats, but there are still plenty of formats to try out!
Krisi92
Trample, eh? Well, you DO assign some damage to the “stuff behind the defending Pokémon”…
MarxForever
This guy was a real Baby killer.
The real problem was not being able to attach Dark Energy to it’s previous evolutions. But once you got it going you could end things surprising quickly for your opponent.
Submariner
I like how Hironobu Yoshida typically based his watercolor-ish style on Sugimori’s/SUPER_32X’s from that era in the first 2 Neo series sets