#espeon-ex

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Pokemon Card of the Day #2204: Espeon-EX (BREAKpoint)

Espeon-EX was a very weird one. It wasn’t going to do much damage at all, and its main use would be to devolve the opponent’s Pokemon in an era where even a lot of Stage 2 decks ran a ton of the Stage 1. This didn’t feel like a recipe for success. There was one side-effect, if temporary, to forcing something to a lower form, however: a notable HP drop at a time where there were plenty of ways to hit the Bench. That was a combo worth exploring.

170 HP was on the lower end of what Pokemon-EX typically had, but was still enough to take a hit. The exception, outside of absurdly strong attacks, was against some Psychic-types like Garbodor or Espeon-GX due to that Weakness. Psychic was a rather good type, making this a potential problem. The Retreat Cost was very nice, at just 1, and with Espeon-EX wanting to typically use a cheap attack once and then get out of there, it was nice to have.

Miraculous Shine was the one thing Espeon-EX had going for it. Requiring just a Colorless Energy, it had you devolve each of your opponent’s evolved Pokemon and put the highest Stage Evolution card on it into the opponent’s hand. Putting it back in the opponent’s hand meant that it would, in many cases, be expected to punish Rare Candy use, though Rare Candy was at a general low point at the time. The drop in HP was the bigger prize here most of the time, and decks with Pokemon such as Decidueye-GX or Alolan Ninetales-GX could spread a bunch of damage around and then use Espeon-EX to get multiple Prizes at once. This took some time, but did work with the general goal of those sorts of decks already and it wasn’t like this addition took much deck space.

Psyshock was bad. 70 damage for 3 Energy? Even ignoring effects on the opponent’s Active Pokemon didn’t save that.

Espeon-EX was a nice addition to any deck that could spread a bunch of damage around over the course of a game. Forcing the lower HP of a lower-Stage Evolution to get Prizes was a nice trick. It would have some rough games, as anything that worked as a Basic Pokemon, such as any Pokemon-EX, didn’t have to worry about this at all, but you could get away with those occasional games when you only needed 1 Energy and took up only 1 slot in a deck. Espeon-EX had Decidueye-GX as a good natural partner and you’d see it show up in quite a few decks built around it.

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