It's very nice in slower, Stage 2 decks. You really want it as a starter.
1. It creates a Trainer Lock. Yep, it can hurt you as well, but you plan for that by running adequate Supporters/Pokemon lines. Most importantly, your opponent cannot use their Rare Candies, SP Trainers, Stadiums, Lux Ball etc . . . all of which means that their deck slows down, so they lose at least some of their speed advantage.
2. Meanwhile you use Darkness Grace to evolve your benched Pokemon, while they have to search out their evolution lines and evolve manually.
3. If they KO Spiritomb, that activates Upper Energy.
4. With a Special Dark, it will do 20 damage!!!shiftone1! It can do 40-50 to a Gengar!
Extra evolution by itself wouldn't be enough. Look at MD Phione. But Spiritomb's Poke-Body slows down the SP decks that would be sniping/ko'ing that stage 1 on the bench the next turn and gives some of your pokemon a chance to survive for another turn.
Well Prime its worth noting that Phone also had an 1 energy cost attack.
Well then how about, "Extra evolution by itself wouldn't be enough. Look at Technical Machine TS-1."
You could also argue that TS-1 requires an extra space in your deck and isn't searchable.
It takes the same amount of space as Spiritomb if you run the same number of them... And I was just making the point that even a 0 energy evolve attack is not enough to warrant deck space.
dur, keiru.
Regardless, the trainer lock is the real reason to use Spiritomb above anything else, so...
its good because it has both the body and the attack, no body = bad, noattack = mediocre at best
Most definetly, I'd say without the free evolution attack spiritomb is only at a 7/10 (lol the body is THAT good seeing as the rest of the card is pretty meh). Coupled with the attack, Spiritomb gets a solid 9.5/10 in today's fast-paced metagame. If 'tomb had just 10 more hp, did like 20 more dmg with his other attack, or had free retreat, he would be at like 11/10, lol.