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pokemon-card-of-the-day · 2 years

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Pokemon Card of the Day #2597: Dark Gloom (Team Rocket)

Dark Gloom was a rather surprising evolving Stage 1. Yes, you’d always be using it with Dark Vileplume in reality. That doesn’t mean that Dark Gloom didn’t have its own purpose, as Confusion was actually quite powerful against someone who couldn’t play any Trainer cards. Good enough that Dark Gloom deserves its own look, as there were some specific strategies that needed to be used to get the most out of its Pokemon Power.

Dark Gloom didn’t have the best stats. 50 HP was just awful, and sometimes that could be a problem if you didn’t get the Pokemon Breeder early and gave the opponent enough time to use Gust of Wind on it. The Fire Weakness made even the relatively weak Magmar a problem, as it could basically coin flip to KO in 1 hit if it didn’t use PlusPower. Luckily, this mattered far less when Dark Vileplume got into play as there weren’t too many ways to force switches with Pokemon at the time. Dark Gloom also needed 2 Energy to retreat, so it could be a problem to get out to another Pokemon if it did get stuck up front.

Pollen Stench was the reason that Dark Gloom had actual use for more than just getting to Dark Vileplume. Yes, Dark Vileplume being in play was required to get the most out of it, but having Dark Vileplume and Dark Gloom in play at once was great with the right set-up. Once during your turn, you could flip a coin. If heads, the Defending Pokemon was Confused, and if tails your Pokemon was Confused. The risk didn’t sound worthwhile, but there were ways to help get around it. One of the biggest ones was to use Snorlax up front, as it was a bulky Pokemon that could take a lot of hits and couldn’t be Confused. If you got enough Energy on it, you’d really get 2 flips at a Special Condition. One for Body Slam’s Paralysis and 1 for Pollen Stench assuming a single Dark Gloom. Another possible play was more of a limited thing, but if Dark Vileplume was the only one in play and was sent up front, a tails on Pollen Stench could let you use Trainers and then you could use your last Trainer to switch Dark Vileplume out to get the lock back in place. There were also somewhat more awkward options like Dragonite, which could work but were hard to build around. Any of these could make good use of Pollen Stench, which still had some luck involved but still had enough chances to come out ahead when prepared for it.

Poisonpowder was just 10 damage plus Poison for 2 Grass Energy. The Poison could be nice, but Dark Vileplume wasn’t an ideal attacker so you didn’t want to stack Energy on a Dark Gloom most of the time.

Dark Gloom wasn’t entirely reliable, but was good enough to get some nice disruption in since you were already using this to get to Dark Vileplume anyway. Some tricks could make the risk very one-sided and make it even harder to get through Dark Vileplume’s Trainer lock to actually win a game. It wasn’t a true stand-alone Stage 1 and somehow provided value anyway. That’s a rather rare sight in any era of the game.

#pokemon #pokemon tcg #card of the day #gloom #dark gloom #team rocket

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ardley · 8 months

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