At the risk of looking like a jerk, I want to clarify some of Swordfish1989's points:
- Pokémon-EX are not to be confused with the old Pokémon-ex despite the fact that they are indeed very similar; odds are you didn't need that warning but every time I leave it out... seems like it is the wrong time. :lol:
- Dowsing Machine has a nearly identical effect but different name to Item Finder from Base Set/Base Set 2, which means its a better Junk Hunt; all Trainers (Items, Stadiums, and Supporters) are legal targets. Might be some slight tweaks and timing differences, and of course Dowsing Machine is specifically an Ace Spec card.
- Gothitelle (BW: Emerging Powers 47/98) blocks Items, not all Trainers... though I may be risking confusing you more rather than less due to when you were last active. When this game began, we had Pokémon, Trainers, and Energy as the three primary card types, and with the release of Black & White that is what we returned to; for a while they experimented with splitting Supporters and Stadiums into their own major card "types", but now they are once again subclasses of "Trainer".
Cards are read according to when they were printed; new cards follow the current guidelines:
Gothitelle blocks Items (which basically means any Trainer that isn't a Stadium or Supporter). If you were playing with older cards released during the split, then "Trainer" would be treated like "Item".
I'm seeing a lot of these outright Paralysis attacks by skimming around the card lists, are people running more Switch and friends or are most of these cards too slow to really be useful?
For the most part,
both plus more. :lol: The format is crazy fast right now; if your deck goes off past your third turn, it is too slow. If it goes off reliably by your third turn, it is slow. Your deck needs to be reliably ready by your second turn to be "average", and the fastest decks bring it first turn. So yes, a lot of the attackers being printed are just too slow.
This format has a lot of alternatives to manually retreating at full cost. The most recent and effective seems to be the combination of
Keldeo EX (
here is one of its releases) with
Float Stone (
EX: Plasma Freeze 99/106); as long as the combination is intact and nothing is negated, you've basically got a free
Switch each turn. Keep in mind, this is just the most effective and that there are more.
This format is very big on "type-matching"; you can't rely on it to completely carry a deck, but it can propel an otherwise solid deck to first place. Damage switched back to "x2" with
Black & White, and so many cards hit so hard that it is rare for Weakness not to result in a OHKO. More recent but more important is
Hypnotoxic Laser, an Item which automatically Poisons the Defending Pokémon and also gets a flip to score Sleep. This is usually combined with
Virbank City Gym which causes Poison to place an extra two damage counters between turns. Sorry for the lack of links, but I am running out of time. :redface: Anyway, as you can see changing out your Active is pretty important to most decks now.
TL;DR: Stuff. Sorry, I am lousy at condensing it.
