Pokemon Card of the Day: Gyarados (Stormfront)

Today's Pokemon Card of the Day is Gyarados from the Stormfront set. This card has an amazing 130 hp for a stage 1 Pokemon card, but it should be extra powerful considering how bad most Magikarp cards are, you need something to look forward to by having Magikarp in your deck. A +30 weakness to electric type Pokemon is actually good instead of a x2 weakness or any kind of weakness to grass Pokemon since grass Pokemon are much more prevalent and usually more powerful. A -20 hp resistance to fighting Pokemon is nice and can make Gyarados last that much longer since it already has a high 130 hp. The only bad thing about this card is that it has a very high retreat cost of 3 colorless energy cards, so if you are going to play this card, you are more than likely going to play it until it feints unless you want to lose a lot of energy cards by retreating it. But I guess it makes sense that Gyarados would have a high energy cost since its most powerful move takes 5 energy cards and you aren't supposed to be able to retreat Gyarados and then put it back in right away and then use its most powerful move within 1 turn. Gyarados doesn't have any Poke-Body or Poke-Power but it does have 3 moves. The first move, called Tail Revenge, doesn't take any energy cards and does 30x damage for each Magikarp you have in your discard pile. So you most likely won't be able to use this move, if you are good, but if you have more than 1 Gyarados in your deck then this will be able to do at least 30 damage the second time you use Gyarados. Gyarados's second move is called Wreak Havoc and does 40 hp damage for 2 energy cards, 1 colorless, 1 water. Not only does this do 40 hp damage but you can flip a coin and discard the top card of your opponent's deck for each heads you get until you flip a coin. Gyarados's third and most powerful move is called Dragon Beat and does 100 hp damage for a very costly 5 energy cards, 3 colorless and 2 water. Not only does this do major damage, but you also flip a coin and if you get heads you get to discard 1 energy attached to each of your opponent's Pokemon. As far as strategy goes, I would stock up Gyarados with energy cards before I put it has my active Pokemon then I would use Dragon Beat every turn if I had the necessary energy. Another way I would use Gyarados would be to only have the one Gyarados in your deck and save it until the very end of the game when your opponent has few cards in their deck and then use Wreak Havoc to make your opponent lose the game by running out of cards in their deck. I really like this card because it can not only do a lot of hp damage to your opponent but also its two main moves both do other things that benefit Gyarados besides doing damage. So I would definitely consider this card when building a water deck and once again thanks for reading this review and stay tuned for tomorrow's review of Kingdra Prime from the new Unleashed set.