Japan's XY9 Set: 'Rage of the Broken Sky,' New 'Battle Strengthening Sets'

I'm pretty disappointed to be honest... New mechanics should be accompanied by new cards...



p.s. Only Wonder Energy can protect from this attack. And other cards: "Prevent all effects attacks excluding damage done to..."

Does this Marowak also?
Huh? Marowak only protects your hand. Raticate or its BREAK do nothing to your hand so I'm confused.
 
Is this the first good raticate the card game has seen? I want this card. :)

If you want this card that is fine, but I don't believe this is the first good Raticate that we have seen... because frankly it isn't that good. XD

Forgive me if this has already been said (playing catch-up on this thread):

BREAK Evolving from Stage 1 = Stage 2 Evolution without perks.

I think there might be a use for this in Expanded: Mew-EX can copy the attack for just one Energy via Dimension Valley while Hypnotoxic Laser and Ariados (AOR) mean that both Items and Abilities have to be offline to prevent the Poison (though of course one could just go with Hypnotoxic Laser if they would rather deal with Item lock than a clunkier set-up).

Not sure if any past Raticate has been particularly good; there are a few that came close like BW: Boundaries Crossed 105/149, which at least one other person has pointed out has the same attack, only for a higher cost.

Edit: Misread the attack cost on Raticate BREAK. Fixed.
 
Last edited:
Not sure if any past Raticate has been particularly good; there are a few that came close like BW: Boundaries Crossed 105/149, which at least one other person has pointed out has the same attack, only for a higher cost.
This is the best because the other one effects the raticate too so raticate has 10hp as well so this may go with that one in expanded so you get a hp boost.
EDIT: woops! does have same attack, but less.
 
This is the best because the other one effects the raticate too so raticate has 10hp as well so this may go with that one in expanded so you get a hp boost.

When you lower something that was already an almost guaranteed OHKO to 10 HP, does it really matter?

In all seriousness the answer is "Only rarely."

There are also about another half dozen candidates to wade through and I don't remember their corresponding metagames/cardpools well enough to judge. ;)

I can tell you that what I said still holds true for this one: it is a Not! Stage 2* so that means one turn you Bench Rattata, then manually Evolve into Raticate and then the next turn manually Evolve into Raticate BREAK. Wally could help a little but it is your Supporter and only shaves off one turn. Raticate BREAK only has 110 HP so if something can OHKO a Shaymin-EX, it can take out Raticate BREAK (barring effects that boost damage only against Pokémon-EX). Oh, just noticed I misread Raticate BREAK though, I thought its attack only required [C]... so that makes it less appealing and I need to edit my previous post. ^^'

*This is shorthand I've encountered for when you have a blatant expy character in fiction or "We can't get the license so this is as close as we can get." product, such as with Transformers.
 
Finally get caught up on the discussion:

I still don't understand why I'm Broken and Raging. This card art is too amazing to make me upset. :/

If you play the game it is a little more obvious.

If you've been playing the game for 10+ years, it is really obvious, though maybe that doesn't count as you're likely always broken and raging. XD

@SaiScott95 Don't be a buzz killer...

I find it a buzzkill when people hype cards, especially overhype cards. They rarely live up to the expectations except when they are negative e.g. "This will force the game to go this way even more!".

Even if it turns out to not be that good, it's a good sign regarding evolution cards. Plus, we still don't know what support cards might be in the set that can help evolution cards...

Why? Why is this different from all the other Evolutions with some promise but which cannot hope to keep up with the contemporary metagame because the pace has become too quick and Evolving Pokémon are largely worthless and thus just wasted deck space? If anything, the fact that the designers keep doing this is just a sign they are going to keep doing it.

The more useful Evolving lower Stages we see, the more big, Basics we see that take a few turns to properly set-up and can't really do anything before then, the more promising things are for a balanced metagame where fully Evolved Pokémon (what includes Basics that don't Evolve!) are on approximately equal footing. ;)

On the other hand, what we don't need are ideas that were fully implemented but failed spectacularly before like

Reprinting Rare Candy the way it was before would be a start...
Well, the thing is Rare Candy was always a good card before they decided to nerf it at the start of BW, mainly to allow other trainer cards to be played on the first turn since it was seen as overpowered at the time (getting Stage 2s turn 2 was easily achieved back then, and in Platinum format there was also Broken Time Space). However, it was precisely in the BW era that Big Basics started to appear and dominate the format, so now I don't see any reason to not restore Rare Candy to its previous effect.

Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. It didn't balance things out, it just ended up making Evolutions overpowered for a while, until by the end it only made specific cards overpowered. Although such things work across the board, they don't fix problems.
 
Did anyone else noticed that the XY9 Raticate is in the same-ish pose as Dark Raticate from Team Rocket (TR 51)? It's the very first thing I noticed.

I thought that was kind of funny. Also, you could kinda tell from the Raticate's art that it was collecting all that golden energy needed to BREAK evolve! If you go back and look at Zoroark BKT, you can see that it's glowing gold as well.

Also interesting to note is that Raticate from FireRed & LeafGreen also had an ability that blocked Special Conditions.

Unfortunately without any currently revealed BREAK support, getting out a BREAK may not be worth it for the whole Ariados + Raticate combo (although I'd be glad to eat my words). Especially as it only has 110 HP, even with an Assault Vest I don't see it living through much. Remember that it took them FOUR whole sets to release Spirit Links and Megas that truly were worth using them. This is BREAK set number two, so perhaps we're going to need to wait for XY11 before we get BREAK support and BREAKs that are good enough to warrant "maintstream" tournament play.

One final combo I noticed would be using Super Fang on something holding Fighting Spirit Belt, then discarding the Belt next turn with Megaphone. But yeah. At the moment, it looks like this is going to be very niche, if that.
 
About the (Fake) Blitzle,
someone definitely should make a tcg set with that kind of fun attacks :p
010001100 10001100 00101110
 
Raticate BREAK with Ariados anybody?
Kinda late buddy. Ariados doesn't work against grass Pokémon (and against M Sceptile, they can just heal off all the damage counters before you get a chance to attack it for the KO). It'll be way too evolution-based and clunky to work.
 
Kinda late buddy. Ariados doesn't work against grass Pokémon (and against M Sceptile, they can just heal off all the damage counters before you get a chance to attack it for the KO). It'll be way too evolution-based and clunky to work.

You could also run Haunter from BREAKThrough to confuse them instead
 
Back
Top