The Ultra Pulls

Oh hey, another post about a children's card game! It's another pre-release so you know the drill: I spend $30, have fun playing a few games, and end up not taking any rare cards home. Or so I thought. Turns out, Ultra Prism had some ultra surprises for me (and I promise not to overuse the word "ultra").

After failing to catch an Omastar in a Pokémon Go raid, We got our deck boxes to open up our first four packs of cards. I carefully opened the booster pack, and to my surprise ...

Yep, that's a secret rare Glaceon GX card. Apparently, it's worth $80. It's safe to assume that I was freaking out. After so many pre-releases of common cards, I finally got something rare! This easily topped the full art Lugia EX during Ancient Origins. I showed a few people this card, and pretty much everyone played the "I'm going to runaway with your card" joke. It was annoying -- please don't do that. Unfortunately, I didn't get an Eevee in my packs, so I couldn't use Glaceon GX in the tournament. However, I did get some useful cards to play with.

If you read my last pre-release post, you might remember that you also get an evolution pack at every event. This time around, they made the evolution deck more cohesive with the promo card you got. For instance, I got a promo Lucario, so I had two sets of the Garchomp line and Cynthia to help combo with the Precognitive Aura ability. I hate Garchomp, but that's besides the point.

 

Pro: This combo works really well.
Con: Garchomp is stupid and I hate it.

What really made the deck scary was the addition of Darkrai Prism. Prism cards are a new mechanic introduced with the Ultra Prism set. You're only allowed one prism card with the same name (so I can't have two Darkrai Prism cards in the same deck), and they go to the Lost Zone when knocked out (not the usual discard pile). It'll be cool to see if the Lost Zone mechanic will be utilized like it was in the Heartgold/Soulsilver era.

Besides the awesome shininess, Darkrai Prism is a terror as soon as it hits the field. Not only does it get two dark energies from your hand when you put it on your bench, but it does a lot of damage and requires the opponent to flip two coins to wake up -- no wonder they limited it to one per deck! Darkrai Prism worked well with Lucario and Garchomp since Lucario could fish it out of your deck and Garchomp has free retreat cost for when you're ready to unleash a never-ending nightmare.

How can something so shiny be so evil?

So how did this deck fare? Eh, it did alright. I got off Darkrai Prism's attack often enough, but my opponent flipped two heads to immediately wake up! Every other time I used Abyssal Sleep, I knocked out the opponent. After winning two out of three matches, I got the final four packs and didn't pull anything noteworthy. Content with my Glaceon GX, I left ... I didn't want to deal with anyone trying to "runaway" with my card.

As this new set was heavily focused on Generation 4 Pokémon, I didn't get any Alola cards to cross off my list. But hey, I had fun! Plus, I might even build a Lucario/Garchomp deck? It's surprisingly cheap now that I have most of the tech cards needed to make it work. All in all, I had an ultra good time.

I'm sorry, I won't use "ultra" again!