Yanmega Prime is one of the many over-hyped Pokemon Prime. The sky is also blue: how many Pokemon Prime haven't been over-hyped? :lol:
It is a Grass Stage 1 Pokémon. Stage 1 Pokémon have had to work very hard as of late: Pokémon SP are Basics and thus faster, Stage 2 Pokémon can do more (and are arguably faster thanks to Rare Candy). None of the Yanma really thrill me, though at least some of the older one's will have more metagame friendly stats. Back to
Yanmega Prime, it has 110 HP which is good for a Stage 1 Pokémon. Lightning Weakness which makes it
Luxray bait, but this is somewhat offset Fighting Resistance, which combined with the rest of the card will infuriate an unprepared
Donphan Prime player. Rounding out the stats is a Free Retreat Cost: simply beautiful. This means if the rest of the card works out, it can be an opening Pokémon that gets out of the way once its job is done.
The Poké-Body, Insight, makes this card. If you have the same number of cards in your hand as your opponent, the attack cost of each this card’s attack is… zero! That is right: nothing. Not just shedding a Colorless Energy requirement like we’ve seen in the past, but absolutely no Energy is required to attack! Now, on its own, the first attack would be alright. Linear Attack gives you the choice to hit any of your opponent’s Pokémon for 40 points of damage. That is pretty good for (LC), and if the Poké-Body didn't directly address the problem, I’d bemoan it being unable to use
Double Colorless Energy. The big attack, Sonicboom, would suffer similarly. You get a good 70 points of damage for just (LLC). You also to ignore Resistance but at the cost of missing Weakness as well. Of course, how many cards off the top of your head can you name with either? If you're me, not many at all, making it somewhat irrelevant. Being unable to use
Double Colorless Energy is crippling normally, but with the Poké-Body it is an annoyance and nothing more.
Using the card to its best requires matching your opponent's hand size. After all, one’s opponent is in total control of his or her own hand size, right? Not this format.
In terms of Pokémon we have
Giratina from Platinum: its Let Loose Poké-Power means when you Bench it, each player shuffles his/her hand into the deck and draws four cards. Then of course there is
Judge, a Supporter with the same effect. Don't forget good old
Copycat, allowing you to feed off an opponent’s large hand. With all of these, you just have to make sure that Pokémon or Supporter is the last card you play for the turn. In exchange for a free 40 points of damage to whatever you want or 70 to the Active is worth restraining yourself.
Originally I was going to list a few more tricks to match up hand size, but Bondiborg pointed out it was getting to overkill territory. I’d forgotten that Vs Seeker was still legal, so you can recycle those two Supporters for this deck four times. This gives you a hard hitting, interesting deck where you mess with your opponent’s hand and Bench (via Seeker/Giratina) while hitting something on the Bench for 40 or the Active for 70, for no Energy and many turns all at the same time! As this is a Stage 1 Pokémon, you shouldn't
need to match up much more than that. Indeed, if you're running
Yanmega Prime as your main attacker, you deck should score six KOs so fast it won't matter.
Even if you max everything out, you’ve only got 12 Pokémon, 12 Supporters and four Trainers so far.
Miasma Valley won’t hurt either of what we’ve used and naturally sets up more OHKOs for the decks. Granted,
Broken Time Space is also very tempting, since if you go second it should allow you to start swinging right away, but it also helps your opponent play out their hand, and running contrary to about half your strategy.
Shaymin Lv.X (126/127, Platinum) buffs
Yanmega Prime up to 150 HP. You might run
Cherrim from Stormfront for extra damage. Or you could focus on the “no Energy” angle by running other Pokémon that can waylay your opponent “for free”, and giving you all that extra deck space for the Trainers needed to push such effects to the max. You could also just tighten up the card count, such as a 2-2 of the
Yanmega and whatever supporting cards easily fit or already being used by your deck (who doesn’t have a love/hate relationship with
Judge?), and use it as a fantastic opener/sweeper.
This looks like a good pick for Limited, even if you have to actually power it up: sniping is always handy, as is a Free Retreat. As there is less draw power, your opponent should have a harder time dodging the effect. Just make sure you don’t play down your hand until they do, and they shouldn’t have much luck building their hand up to something larger than you can match. The main failing in this strategy is if they actually can play their hand out and you are stuck with a handful of Energy cards or Evolutions.
Ratings
Modified: 8/10
Limited: 8/10
Summary
Yanmega does suffer in match-ups against some popular decks, and nearly everyone I have talked to or read about the card from has hammered it home. A few dwell on how "hard" it will be to consistently match hand size. In both cases, I really think it is viewing the card as the deck and not part of a deck. In a focused build it should actually be quite easy: you shouldn't need to match hand size for more than six turns as either you're focusing on OHKOs and that is all the attacks you should need or you're merely buying time to set-up the real attacker on the Bench. Just adding it to another deck is a bit trickier, but should be feasible in general and good for decks that would already want to max out on
Judge and either
Vs Seeker or
Copycat.
