I’ve been tackling the challenges in Pokémon TCG Pocket like crazy in order to get more hourglasses to get cards from the Mythical Island set. Some of these new cards have amazing abilities, like Mew’s Genome Hacking move for example, and I’m a big fan of the Leaf and Blue Trainer card abilities too. One card that kept trouncing me every time, however, was Celebi EX, and I couldn’t work out why it kept getting double the number of coin flips while having so few energies on it.
The answer – Serperior. Serperior has the ability ‘Jungle Totem’ which doubles the Grass Energy on your Pokémon, so it can work its magic on the bench just like Gardevoir does with Mewto EX. So when Celebi EX uses Powerful Bloom and flips a coin for each energy it has on it, delivering 50 damage for each heads, Jungle Totem doubles the number of Grass Energy and doubles the number of coins Celebi EX can flip.
Sneaky, right? Well, do we know of any existing cards that deal more damage depending on the number of energies your opponent has? That’s right, Jinx and Alakazam are here to save the day. I’ve been trawling through my cards as well as diving around in Reddit and reading about other users’ experiences, and these two cards are able to cause quite a stir!
Jinx’s Psychic move does 30 damage plus 20 for each Energy attached to your opponent. So, if Celebi EX has three Grass Energy attached to it that are then doubled by Serperior, then Jinx’s attack will do 30 damage plus 6 lots of 20, making 150 damage in total, knocking Celebi EX out and giving you two points in the process. Alakazam does a whopping 60 damage plus 30 for every energy your opponent has on their active Pokémon, so in this scenario, you would do 240 damage! Still, Alakazam is harder to pull out than Jinx as you’ll need to evolve Abra and Kadabra, whereas Jinx is a basic card that doesn’t evolve.
If anything, this is going to make Psychic decks a heck of a lot stronger in the game too, what with Mew EX having the Genome Hacking move that can take down Charizard before it gets a chance to collect four Fire Energy to pull off 200 damage. I can see Taurus joining Psychic decks too with its damage boost for EX cards too.
The game has been shaken up in a really nice way with the arrival of new cards, leaving users like me stumped as to which decks to build next. Still, thanks to Jinx and Alakazam, it looks like Celebi EX and indeed Serperior’s days are numbered, and I’m looking forward to seeing what other Genetic Apex cards will come into their own as more packs are released.
