Mamoswine is a Water Type Pokemon, but owing to it being a Ice-Type in the video games it "enjoys" taking double damage from a Metal Weakness and not, say, a Lightning or Grass. Since we are still on the mysterious side of Cities, I can't say for sure which Weakness will be worse but it'd take a radical shift to make Lightning Weakness "okay", so I'd say our elephantine swine got off good. 140 HP is good for a Stage 2: most playable Stage 2 Pokemon clock in at about that. Outside of Weakness, most decks will need two or three shots to take
Mamoswine down. The lack of a Resistance is disappointing: besides feeling like the game is over-simplified, it also robs
Mamoswine of a potentially solid match-up.
Mamoswine has an expected but no less troubling four energy Retreat Cost. You either pack some cards to change it out, heal it, or preferably both.
Mamoswine has two attacks, and chunky Energy costs are somewhat mitigated by
Double Colorless Energy usage: you won't be able to use
Rare Candy or
Broken Time Space to jump to
Mamoswine in a single turn and still be able to attack without help, but if you take at least two turns to build it, you won't have to sit without attacking a turn. Icy Wind for
water::colorless::colorless
isn't brilliant, but its passable: 40 damage is a bit low and automatic Sleep is alright. That gives you a 50% chance of your opponent's Active being unable to attack if your opponent can't evolve, Level-Up, or simply use an effect to heal/change out their Active. In short, even if they don't naturally wake up you shouldn't expect it to stall too well. Ultimately, it isn't a horrible attack and it will be a decent "still powering up" attack for
Mamoswine, and when Sleep does work it tends to be a nearly universal combo opener: when your opponent can't fight back most other attacks are all the more effective!
The second attack is Snowstorm for
water::water::colorless::colorless
and hits for 70 damage to the Defending Pokemon and 20 point to each of your opponent's Benched Pokemon that already have any damage counters on them. A solid attack, but it needs a lot of support to be more than a vanilla 70: most opponent's will be able to avoid getting any damage on Benched Pokemon unless you force the issue.
Getting damage spread fast can take some doing. You could run this in a Rain Dance deck, which would certainly speed it up, but there are so many other options that would serve you better: you need to spread damage before this really becomes good. If you actually felt you could risk running an even split of the Modified Legal versions of Feraligatr, it could be quite nasty: neither is Lightning Weak and besides the Prime version's Rain Dance the other has Spinning Tail for
water::colorless::colorless
and doing an adequate 20 damage to everyone of your opponent's Pokemon, or 80 for
water::water::colorless::colorless
. If you can squeeze in
Double Colorless Energy as well, you might even be able to cope with Power denial strategies.
Personally, I am thinking you are better looking for non-Water dance partners for this porcine pachyderm. Random idea just for this review, but open with
Absol Prime. Drop a
Call Energy on it so you don't waste your first term, and if it isn't getting pounded drop a
Darkness Energy and start taking 70-a-pop pot shots. Build up
Mamoswine after
Absol Prime's Poke-Body has made sure everything your opponent plays already has 20 damage on it, and bring up
Mamoswine slam, slam slam for multiple Prizes. We could also use
Crobat G to drop counters fairly quick - is it possible to build a Pokemon SP deck with this as the non-SP splash?
For Limited play,
Mamoswine is great! The attacks make it not easy to work into an off-type deck, but feasible. If you have enough Water Pokemon to make sure it is one of the types that go into your average triple-typed Limited deck, its pretty handy to need only two of your Type of Energy. The bad news is that you'll be stuck up front once you get
Mamoswine there, without access to Trainers to easily Bench it, but your opponent won't be able to use that to get around Sleep as easily. Plus, retreating an injured Pokemon is a common Prize denial strategy in this format, so Snowstorm stands to net multiple Prizes.
Ratings
Modified: 7/10
Limited: 9/10
I think this card has some potential, but mostly for clever League decks or one-time tournament showings that rely on the element of surprise.
