I was looking at the Forretress ex and thought, “ooh, nice. We’ve never had one of those before. And also, now I suppose there’s some small chance of it making its way into our December shiny vault.”
The I realized it was teralized and thought, “sweet, now we get to see another tera crown. It may mean delaying the Grass type tera crown, which I vastly prefer, but it’s nice to see Forretress getting this further special treatment.”
Then I saw it’s ability and thought “Yoooooooooo! Electrode ex spiritual successor! In a format with Defiant Belt! Now we’re starting to the the successor decks come together!”
Seriously, though, part of what made Electrode ex good was access to cards like Pow! Hand Extension which allowed you to play from behind. At the very least, Forretress ex decks have access to a powerful, universal, but hitherto awkward and unwieldy damage modifier that slots perfectly into the deck’s strategy. And also, Iono will work well with this archetype. Which cards benefit from this ability the most is still up in the air for now, but if we continue to get cards based on comebacks, we might see a fun, nostalgia-inducing deck arise. (Yes, Electrode ex was after my time, but I still love playing decks built around it on TCGONE. Hopefully a Forretress ex deck would be as fun to play as an Inteleon engine deck or a Lost Box deck, two of my favorite modern archetypes, which produce a fair number of skillful interactions and can be scaled in power in relation to whatever deck my brother chooses to use due to enabling a wide number of variants.)
EDIT: I just noticed Forretress only attaches Grass type Energy, so it’s not as ubiquitous as I once imagined, but that’s okay, since Grass tends to get less support than many other types, at least since 2016. Also, it reduces the chances of this card breaking the format wide open.
Also, I hope Wo-Chien gets a card eventually. I’ve always liked snails, and while I know it’s based on eastern tradition, it’s backstory about a man writing the king’s evils on a wooden tablet gives me Biblical Old Testament prophet vibes. I feel like I could write a short story about it through that lens.
