Gyarados 21/98 -- Ancient Origins Pokemon Card Review

Pokemon Card Overview:
Today's Pokemon Card Review is of Gyarados from the Ancient Origins Pokemon Card Set.  This is the second of the two Gyarados card reviews from this set.  Gyarados is a stage 1, water type Pokemon card, with an hp of 130.  It has a x2 weakness to lightning type Pokemon, no resistance type, and a three colorless energy card retreat cost.  This Gyarados card has an Ancient Trait called Double that says this Pokemon may have up to 2 Pokemon Tool cards attached to it.  Besides the Ancient Trait, Gyarados has two moves.  The first move that this card has is called Full Retaliation, for two colorless energy cards this move does 30 damage plus 30 more damage for each damage counter on each of your benched Magikarp.  Gyarados' second move is called Thrash and for four energy cards, two each of colorless and water, this move does 100 damage plus 30 more damage if you get a heads when flipping a coin, or if you get a tails it does 30 damage to Gyarados.

Pokemon Card Strategy:
So as far as strategy goes, since Gyarados is a stage 1 Pokemon card, you'll first have to get Magikarp into play (I reviewed Magikarp from this set two days ago) and then evolve Magikarp into Gyarados, since there are two Gyarados cards in this set I'll be comparing the two later in this post.  If you read my review of Magikarp, you'll know that I thought the card was very poor, just like all Magikarp cards are, having a very low HP, and a very low chance of actually doing any damage when attacking, so you'll definitely want to keep Magikarp on the bench at all times.  So knowing this about Magikarp and looking at this Gyarados card, it quickly reduces the chances of me wanting to use Full Retaliation, because to do more than 30 damage with this move you need to have damage on Magikarp and with only 30 HP, that is just asking for Magikarp to be knocked out.  Gyarados' second move is a bit better, but I would rather use yesterday's Gyarados card for well over 130 damage a turn every single turn without risking damage to Gyarados.  So if I had to choose between the two Gyarados cards from this set, I would use yesterday's all day long.

Pokemon Card Rating:
I would give this card a 2 out of 5 rating.  In my opinion this is a below average Stage 1 Pokemon card from the Ancient Origins set and one that is much worse than yesterday's Gyarados card.  I wanted to look this card quite a bit, but it is just too underpowered in my opinion and slow on the attack.  Combined with Magikarp from this set, I can only give these cards a 2 out of 5 rating.

Tomorrow's Pokemon Card:
So thanks for reading today's Pokemon card review of Gyarados from the Ancient Origins set, stay tuned for tomorrow's card review of Vaporeon, which is from this same set.  Make sure to check below for the Free Pokemon TCG Online Codes!

Free Pokemon TCG Online Code Cards:
Today's Quiz for a Pokemon TCG Online Code Card --
True or False?  Gyarados from Base Set was the first Pokemon card I ever obtained.
Please respond by including your YouTube username and link to your YouTube channel.  If the question is quite tough, the first correct comment will win, otherwise I'll use a random number generator to choose a winner.