The Pokemon CompanyPokemon TCG Pocket’s Shining Revelry expansion is just around the corner, and one of its cards is guaranteed to be a universally hated plague on the meta.
While a core mechanic in every version of the TCG, coin flip cards added in previous Pocket expansions have consistently been criticized for being impossible to play around, especially when luck favors the card’s user.
Genetic Apex’s wildly popular Misty and Articuno combo is just one example of infamously powerful decks relying on coin flips, but even Cerulean City’s Gym leader has nothing on Shining Revelry’s new Trainer.
Team Rocket Grunt is TCG Pocket’s strongest coin flip card
When played, Team Rocket Grunt triggers the following effect:
- Flip a coin until you get tails. For each heads, discard a random Energy from your opponent’s Active Pokemon.
Sounds like a nightmare to play against, right? If the user gets a streak of heads flips, it will be. Even if the result averages out to only two heads results before landing tails, it’s still a severe setback for the opposing player’s game plan.
Team Rocket Grunt has the power to singlehandedly win games.While combo decks like Mewtwo ex and Gardevoir can recover from a swingy Team Rocket Grunt by generating more Energy through Abilities, any deck that relies on natural Energy generation faces the likely outcome of having their Active Pokemon completely bricked without any chance of recovering.
Whether Team Rocket Grunt will become an auto-include staple in every deck remains to be seen, but it’s an extremely powerful disruption tool that doesn’t need to be built around, and that’s concerning, to say the least.
It’s not just Pokemon TCG Pocket where Team Rocket’s up to no good. Destined Rivals, the physical TCG’s next major expansion due for release on May 30, is all about boss man Giovanni’s villainous group, and it’s already being scalped to the moon and back.
