The ol’ “I ran out of space for effect text, so lemme get rid of the borders” bit, eh? I see what you did there.
First things first — it’s beautiful art you’ve found for this one; I’m impressed, given how short a time it’s been since the Hisuian Zoroark reveal. The holosheet really adds to it, which isn’t always easy to do with such a bright holosheet as that one — here it brings a few subtle spots of color to an otherwise fairly monochrome piece of art. All told, I think the blending is great.
I know we’ve talked about these half-full-arts and their color blending with the blank in the past, and I think you’ve finally perfected the look. Well deserved full marks in aesthetics.
The flavor of a ghostly Hisuian Zoroark showing up out of nowhere to avenge a fallen ally is good, especially since its attack is very reminiscent of Vengeance-style attacks we’ve seen in the past. Attaching the Hisuian Zoroark to your Active Pokémon as a Tool feels like an odd choice, though — is it tag-teaming with the new Active Pokémon, lending its support but allowing that Pokémon to continue the fighting? We see this very rarely in the TCG, and I’m not sure the flavor is really fleshed out enough for it to make sense to me.
A better option might be to have the Hisuian Zoroark take the place of the fallen Pokémon directly; i.e. make Hisuian Zoroark the new Active Pokémon, rather than attaching to a different one. From a gameplay standpoint, this has the added benefit of making the card’s other stats relevant — you mentioned the low HP as a balancing mechanism, but I reckon if its main purpose is as a retaliatory attacker, you can rely almost exclusively on the Ability to get into play, slapping it onto another Pokémon and never worrying about Hisuian Zoroark’s own 90 HP at all. That all changes if you’re forced to attack with Hisuian Zoroark itself.
On the balance end of things, for the attack, it seems helpful to compare it to
Persian-GX, since that was a card with a similar attack that was also generally played alongside Zoroark-GX. Apart from the damage output, the biggest difference between these two attacks, for me, is the 190-damage cap on Persian-GX’s Vengeance. With the benefit of Zoroark-GX’s Trade to discard Pokémon, Persian-GX was frequently able to hit that high, suggesting that the cap was indeed warranted so as not to break the card. By contrast, Hisuian Zoroark hits that cap with just six Zorua/Zoroark in the discard pile — not at all a difficult feat to achieve with Trade, especially compared to Persian-GX’s nine. With a 4-4 line of Zoroark-GX, a few Hisuian Zoroark, and probably a few non-GX Zoroark for discard fodder, Vengeful Spirit is suddenly hitting for a great deal of damage very quickly.
Where I’m landing, I think, is that it’s a cool concept that has a few flaws in execution. I know you had a busy month, but leaving the last touches till the last minute can mean you don’t get enough time to proofread! The aesthetics are great, but ultimately that’s only 10% of the score — don’t forget to do checks on the other categories, too.
Wording errors:
- “If your Active Pokémon is Knocked Out by damage from an attack during your opponent’s turn” -> “When your Active Pokémon is Knocked Out by damage from an opponent’s attack” (Exp. Share) [-3 points]
- “pick a new Active Pokémon” -> “choose a new Active Pokémon” (Bunnelby PRC etc.) [-1 point]
- “you may reveal this Pokémon from your hand” has never appeared on any real card as far as I’m aware — the two Pokémon with activate-from-hand Abilities,
Audino BCR and
Trumbeak LOT, both use “if this Pokémon is in your hand, you may reveal it”. That being said, I can’t find a way to make this work syntactically with your effect, so I’ll give you the low-sample-size benefit of the doubt and do [-0 points] here.
- The first couple sentences of Vengeful Spirit’s effect would probably be better served in the Ability, following the “attach this card as a Pokémon Tool” clause. Real Pokémon Tools that bequeath additional attacks never put those sentences in the attack itself; it’s always part of the Tool effect, so it seems reasonable that here it should go with the conditions for the Pokémon becoming a Tool. It’ll also need rewording, which should help the first sentence’s clunkiness. [-3 points]
- “amage” -> “damage” [-1 point]
- Strictly speaking the quotes around “Zorua” and “Zoroark” in the attack should be
what Wikipedia calls typographic quotes (per
Tapu Lele LOT), not the neutral quotes you’re using there. I’m not sure how different keyboards render them, but copy-pasting from Wikipedia should do the job if nothing else does. [-0.5 point]
- “it’s” -> “its” in the flavor text. [-1 point]
Fonts and Placement errors:
- The “10” numeral should be right-aligned with the attack text. I know your options are limited when the text box is so much wider and you still need a place to put the “+”, but the numerals and text have still gotta be right-aligned by convention. Otherwise, what do you do when you have one attack that does 10+ and one that just does 10? [-1 point]
- Not strictly incorrect so I won’t dock for it, but if you’re going for the FA pseudo-GX look, I might suggest making the HP numerals bigger to match. I think the “90” on this one looks a little small for the blank.
Creativity/Originality: 11/15
(Ghost Image is neat and has some interesting gameplay implications, though I question the flavor rationale behind attaching Hisuian Zoroark as a Tool rather than, say, having it take the Active Pokémon’s place. Furthermore, the incorporation of the discard pile on this card could probably go beyond a simple Vengeance-style attack.)
Believability/Playability: 12/15
(Some balancing concerns around the attack’s damage output. To some extent it relies on the assumption that the average build for this deck would have access to all the same resources as Zoroark-GX/Persian-GX, including Triple Acceleration Energy, but the tl;dr is that Vengeful Spirit probably ought to have a cap similar to Persian-GX’s Vengeance.)
Wording: 0.5/10
(Several missed things — don’t forget to double-check with references!)
Fonts and Placement: 4/5
(An error and a suggestion.)
Aesthetics: 5/5
(Stunning! Good art choice, subtle holosheet, and great blending with the blank. It feels like something of a capstone aesthetically to the other pseudo-FA cards you’ve submitted for recent rounds, and as far as I’m concerned you’ve aced it with this one.)
Total: 32.5/50
