Stuff goes here. Random Stuff.

wow that sucks D:

Hope you don’t freeze to death!

If the Team Rocket set had a great success story, it had to be Dark Vileplume. No, it obviously wasn't because of the iffy attack, terrible HP for a stage 2, or not too great Retreat Cost. And though the non-holo misprint with Fighting weakness instead of Fire was fun to mess with, it wasn't that either. No, Dark Vileplume's purpose was clear: Use Hay Fever.

Hay Fever was an incredibly strong Pokemon Power, locking down all Trainer cards. It didn't get too much play really early on, just because of the lack of great support to use it with. That changed when Neo Genesis came out.

Sure, there was the basically broken Slowking, which only affected the opponent, but they still had some realistic chance of breaking through the lock until multiple Slowking were set up. While less broken, Dark Vileplume took Trainer lock to the extreme, stopping everything on both sides of the field. Neo Genesis brought along Murkrow as well, and with the newfound popularity of Cleffa, Murkrow had a 50/50 chance to Mean Look lock it in. If it could pull it off, Murkrow couldn't be forced out by Trainer cards, leaving it free to snipe anything it wants to on the bench until a win is obtained.

Clearly, this was far easier in theory than in practice, but it did need to be prepared for. Being too careless with babies against anyone with Murkrow or Oddish was just begging for a loss, and amusingly, if the Dark Vileplume deck carried a few Grass Energy, it had a 50% chance to KO the king of Rocket-On, Feraligatr.

Okay, today you get the two to catch up, now that my computer is working okay again.

Dark Dragonite was a weird Pokemon. Normally, I'd ignore a Stage 2 with only 70 HP and an attack that failed half the time. However, Dark Dragonite had something special. Its power, Summon Minions, let its side search their deck and put two Basic Pokemon on their bench. It wouldn't have been worth it if it didn't evolve from the king of evolution, Dark Dragonair, which could search out the evolutions of these cards. It was actually a decent way to get a set-up going.

Of course, the downside was that its stats weren't that great. 70 damage would be awesome if it could happen all the time, but it didn't, and for 4 Energy you could do much better. There are Basics with 70 HP, and Dark Dragonite was a Stage 2 with this. Overall, it needed to be used as a support Pokemon to help set up a big attacker, but at least it was pretty good at its job.