Hello everyone! This is Elena from Gaia Storm TCG and welcome to another article here at CCG. Today I want to briefly talk about the three starters from Pokémon Sword and Shield and their correspondent cards at the TCG. It is not especially common that the starters from a new generation are playable straight away but, although they probably won’t win too many tournaments, these new three ones have some interesting potential. Let’s see why!

We will start with Rillaboom, which is probably the card with the most straight-forward effect. Once per turn, it lets the player search for two basic plant energies and attach them to one Pokémon in the field. When this card was revealed for the first time, we all thought of Vikavolt from Sun and Moon, a card that had a very similar effect but combining plant and lightning energies. Now, Riballom has an advantage that its predecessor never did: Alolan Exeggutor & Rowlet Tag Team. Exeggutor & Rowlet can use its attack to immediately select one basic plant Pokémon in the bench and evolve it to the stage 2… for zero energy! This of course means that the deck does not need to run rare candies and that the player will always get the turn 2 Rillaboom no matter what. There is just one downside I see in the deck and is that it does not have great attackers other than Exeggutor and Dhelmise V. I guess you can always try to play it with Aurora energies to have more versatility but I am not sure of how efficient that will get.

Next, we have Cinderace, the fire starter evolution. When promoted to the active position, Cinderace can take two energies from the discard pile and attach them automatically. This ability is great and it fits really well with his second attack: for three energies it deals 190 damage to the active Pokémon at the cost of discarding two of them. If you combine Cinderace with Recycle energy, you have a nice little combo where every Cinderace that replaces a fallen one will be ready to attack at no cost. Some interesting card to add to the deck is the Giant Bomb, as it will make opponents think twice before declaring an attack on Cinderace.

Lastly, there is Inteleon, the water type Pokémon based on a British spy. To be honest, I was not a huge fan of this Pokémon at the beginning but I believe it has the potential to shine. Inteleon and its pre-evolution allow the player to search for Trainers card when they hit the field. While this may not seem broken, I think Inteleon might find a spot in some crazy combo decks that are focused around evolutions. It has overall weaker attacks than Rillaboom and Cinderace but if you run Inteleon in your deck you are not probably going to be using it as your main attacker.

As you can see, all the three starter Pokémon and its evolution are quite playable and they all can be found in the Sword & Shield theme decks. Actually, buying those them decks is a good idea because they come with three copies of Professor Magnolia, one of the key supporters of the format and a card that is getting a bit pricey. We will need to wait a bit to see it the starter Pokémon can make it to the top of the format but, from the time being, I suggest to have them on mind. Thanks for reading!