Gym Series Review - Psychic

The Psychic type barely even felt the Gym sets come and go. Their biggest cards were still the same Base-Fossil staples as always and their biggest adversaries were still the heavy-hitting Colorless cards. To be fair, you could say that the Psychic type had been so clearly established as a metagame threat that it just didn't need new cards.

But it's still a little sad how so few of these additions made an impact, especially given the popularity of Sabrina as a character in the franchise.

Sabrina's Abra (lv 12) isn't awful. It has low HP, as is typical of Abra, but it also has free retreat and can do 40 damage for 2 energy...under very specific conditions. The biggest issue with this card is that the opponent can play around it in situations where it would be relevant.

If they walk right into Synchronize, they kind of deserve whatever happens next. But just the threat of Synchronize may force suboptimal plays.

Grade: 4/10

Sabrina's Abra (lv 18) can use Quick Attack for a single energy or can use Psyscan to check their hand if you really, really need to know if it's safe to proceed with your plans.

Quick Attack for a single energy is actually really nice, and it does have more HP than the average Abra card. It's missing the free Retreat Cost Abra is usually known for, but it's a perfectly playable basic.

Grade: 5/10

Sabrina's Abra (lv 11) is the most compelling, at least on its own merits. Psychic-types usually weren't allowed to do 20 damage for a single energy, so Energy Loop is a great attack even with the significant drawback.

You can also just retreat until it becomes relevant or evolves, since it has the typical free retreat. You could run a mix of the three different versions, but this is probably the best one in a vacuum.

Grade: 5/10

Sabrina's Kadabra is a deceptively powerful wall-breaker. Life Drain may require a coin flip, but it completely ignores Resistances and modifiers (like Metal Energy). This allows it to go toe to toe with various fully evolved 'mons in later formats, no matter how bulky they may appear to be.

Sabrina's ESP will even let you flip the coin twice, giving you a 75% chance of crippling anything, even a Chansey or a Steelix.

Grade: 8/10

Sabrina's Alakazam represents infinite possibilities with Psylink, but the reality is that most Pokémon should just be using their attacks themselves instead of going through a middleman. There are some nasty tricks you can pull off, though.

My personal favorite is the combination of Life Drain from its pre-evolution and Meditate from Jungle Mr. Mime. Even if they have a Psychic Resistance, they're almost certainly dead in two hits. It's a little clunky, though.

Grade: 6/10

Sabrina's Slowpoke is bad, but not even in a funny way. It can't attack on the first turn and has to put itself to Sleep to attack on the second turn. I do understand that they liked designing the Slowpoke cards to be these sorts of funny joke cards, but this is just spiteful.

Any deck running this card has to go out of their way to run plenty of strong Basics so that they're less likely to have this guy stuck in the Active. Lame.

Grade: 2/10

Sabrina's Slowbro is interesting, but more of a relic of the time than anything else. They were really hesitant to print solid attacks that do 40 damage on turn 2, but the ship had already sailed since Promo Mewtwo was out in the wild.

I do understand the logic here, though. It does 40, then tries to heal itself, then does 40, etc. It's a very flavorful card based on Slowbro's personality, but it doesn't work well in practice.

Grade: 2/10

Sabrina's Gastly (lv 9) is a respectable Gastly card. While it is less bulky than Fossil Gastly, it still has the free retreat and Lick's Paralysis chance. Fade Out could also be a nice way to do 30 damage in a pinch.

But the real benefit of Sabrina's Gastly cards is that they carve out a path for Sabrina's Haunter, which is incredibly powerful. I feel obligated to give this guy a slight bump to his grade just for that.

Grade: 5/10

Sabrina's Gastly (lv 10) is ultimately a worse card. The gimmick of gaining HP for each Psychic Energy isn't enough to make up for him having a Retreat Cost, a concept foreign to Gastly cards at the time, and not being able to attack on the first turn.

I suppose in theory you could build him up on your bench to make a bigger and bigger ghost, but for what payoff? If his attack also scaled with attached energy, maybe we could've had something here.

Grade: 4/10

Similar to the previous card, Sabrina's Gastly (lv 16) just doesn't accomplish much. It does have 50 HP by default, but I would really prefer to be able to switch in and out freely. This is especially true when the free retreater is the only one who can actually attack on the first turn.

I guess the ability to lock your opponent's 'mon in play could come up every now and then. Run a copy by preference, if you absolutely must.

Grade: 4/10

Sabrina's Haunter (lv 20) is the reason you're willing to run all these ghosts in the first place. If you can get four ghosts into play by the second turn, then Night Spirits does an average of 60 damage. That's peak damage potential.

It only gets crazier if you include copies of Brock's Ninetales, allowing you to potentially have an extra two ghosts in play thanks to Shapeshift. It's ultimately a very frail and one-dimensional strategy, but the threat is very, very real.

Grade: 8/10

Sabrina's Haunter (lv 29) isn't nearly as impressive as its sibling card. You can run a copy if you like the thought of sniping a Baby with Shadow Attack, but frankly it's almost never included in Night Spirits decks.

Even if you wanted a backup attacker in case you start running low on ghosts, this wouldn't be worth including over other options, especially since it actively reduces the odds of you drawing your main attacker.

Grade: 4/10

Sabrina's Gengar (lv 42) isn't super useful. One massive problem is that Dark Wave will revert all of your Brock's Ninetales back instantly, shutting off a key facet of the deck. I would only consider running this in a "purist" build that doesn't run Brock's Ninetales.

Even then, it doesn't have the outstanding damage potential of Sabrina's Haunter (lv 20), so it'll only come up as a way to maybe finish the game if a few of your main attackers go down.

Grade: 5/10

Sabrina's Gengar (lv39) has less HP than its counterpart, but they otherwise suffer similar issues. When you do run one of these cards, it basically only exists to be one of the "extra ghosts" that Brock's Ninetales turns into.

As such, they do have a home in the deck, but it's pretty embarrassing to be a Stage 2 'mon whose main claim to fame is just raising the head count on your bench. Oh well. At least they're technically good for something.

Grade: 5/10

Sabrina's Drowzee (lv 18) is underwhelming, but fine. I suppose Energy Support does at least increase consistency ever so slightly. It was supposed to accelerate energy, but due to a mistranslation it's underwhelming. Thanks, WotC.

Mind Shock does allow you to get around a resistant 'mon, when applicable. But the best Psychic-resists at the time were able to hit way, way too hard for a 50 HP evolving Basic to stop them. It's exactly balanced for an evolving Basic.

Grade: 4/10

Sabrina's Drowzee (lv 15) is even closer to the platonic ideal of "average." It can't get around Resistances and can't find Energy Cards, but it can try to protect itself for a turn with Suggestion.

This one is marginally better at surviving to become Sabrina's Hypno, but honestly that's not a bragging point, as we'll see momentarily. That's not this card's fault, though.

Grade: 4/10

Sabrina's Hypno doesn't have a real home anywhere. It can revive 'mons to either bench, but there were no decks in the era that really cared enough to run a Stage 1 line for just that purpose.

Pendulum Curse looks powerful...until you do the math and realize it's just worse Meditate. Seriously, Jungle Mr. Mime will outperform this guy in terms of damage output in most cases. It's not a good sign when a stall staple hits harder than you.

Grade: 2/10

Sabrina's Mr. Mime (lv 30) can hit a benched 'mon for an average of 15 damage at the cost of 2 energy. That's not good. That's never been good. They did have a bad habit of over-costing bench-sniping attacks, but this just feels maliciously expensive for the payoff.

The HP and Retreat Cost are serviceable and the art is amazing, but it all falls short because he doesn't have any real attacks.

Grade: 2/10

Sabrina's Mr. Mime (lv 20) exists to smooth out the energy in multicolor decks with Sleight of Hand. And it fails at doing so. Mainly because Rainbow Energy and Energy Search already exist.

If I'm going to give up a valuable attack to do something Trainers and Energy Cards already do, the 'mon better have some other utility. But as a 50 HP basic that can't evolve and only has a mediocre second attack, this card just doesn't matter.

Grade: 2/10

Sabrina's Jynx (lv 20) is one of those cards that doesn't have anything aggressively wrong with it, but just doesn't fit anywhere. The best use-case would probably be to just spam Good Night and buy time while you build up your bench, but something like Base Electabuzz can do something similar while threatening bigger damage.

It wants to be a wall, but doesn't have the bulk. It wants to be a haymaker, but doesn't have the damage output. At least they tried?

Grade: 4/10

Sabrina's Jynx (lv 21) is funny, but not good. I do actually love the idea of Helping Hand, converting your opponent's damage counters into card advantage. But...I kind of prefer drawing cards on the FIRST turn of the game?

As for Hug, it's just a below average attack. If I had to use one of these two I'd opt for the first one, and it was already the most "exactly average" card ever, which doesn't bode well for this one. Amazing art, though.

Grade: 2/10

Rocket's Mewtwo is the first card ever to have three attacks on it. Sadly, none of them get it to the level of Promo Mewtwo. To its credit, it was very rare for a basic to be able to deal 60 damage with no drawbacks. As such, there might be a place for it somewhere in the meta.

Juxtapose is more funny than good, since the card is already a reliable attacker. Overall, it's a fine card. It's just that competition for big Basics was stiff.

Grade: 7/10

If we're being completely honest, you could've learned everything you need to know about how the new Psychic-types impacted the meta just by reading Sabrina's Haunter. Night Spirits is the only new Psychic deck that was really born out of the Gym Series, but at least that's something.

There are cards here that you could experiment with in a generic Psychic shell, but overall these are mostly outclassed by cards that came before and after. Even once Base-Fossil was rotated out for the Rocket-On format, that didn't really make any of these cards powerhouses overnight.