Neo Revelation Review - Psychic

Neo Revelation's Psychic-types are uncharacteristically dull for the type. They're mostly generic attackers or half-baked walls that wouldn't even get the average 10-year-old excited.

Even the Unown cards from this set are noticeably less interesting than the other Unown cards. It's honestly a pretty poor showing, especially for a group that contains both a box legendary and a mythical.

Starmie's Core Stream is obviously the move that's supposed to attract players to the card. Potentially doing 20 damage to the opponent's entire team is honestly pretty tempting.

Unfortunately, it's a lot more unwieldy in practice than you might expect. It has a high energy cost and you only have partial control over it, since you need the right board state to get the most out of it. There might be a deck that would love to use this as a secondary attacker, but it hasn't found a permanent home yet.

Grade: 3/10

Smoochum completes the initial wave of Babies, but it's massively underwhelming compared to all of the other Baby cards in the Neo era. To be fair, removing a Special Energy is a perfectly serviceable effect.

But if you're using this card, it should be because you ran out of copies of every other Baby in the format. As a result, it ultimately can't receive a very high score, despite being an objectively solid card.

Grade: 4/10

Misdreavus feels like an intentional redesign of Base Haunter. Sadly, it needs extensive team support to pull off the two-turn combo that the card is going for. If the opponent can retreat or switch, they can turn off the combo easily.

Take note that the card doesn't actually care how the opponent fell asleep, as long as Night Eyes was technically used on the previous turn. There are a few cards from the Team Rocket set (Drowzee and Sleep!) that can help to set up the combo, if you're desperate.

Grade: 5/10

Unown B offers some mild defensive support to the Unown archetype, but it can only move damage counters to itself. If it could have charged up an Unown A that could've been a really cool combo, but sadly it's just an Unown version of Fossil Slowbro.

The Unown decks already struggle to do what they want to do, so you really don't have a lot of room for this do-nothing card.

Grade: 2/10

Unown K is another weirdly specific defensive card for the Unown deck. The Unown cards already have cheap attacks, so it's not like they were really afraid of Energy Removal to begin with.

You're probably better off just running Ecogym if you care that much, but honestly even that would be a wasted card slot.

Grade: 1/10

Unown Y may look like a joke, but it actually does have some utility. By spamming Yield and Super Energy Removal, you can keep the opponent from playing the game for several turns. This makes it a decent option in control decks centered around Fossil Slowpoke.

While it doesn't fit incredibly well in Unown decks, the synergy with Super Potion and Super Energy Removal keeps it somewhat viable.

Grade: 6/10

Lugia's big dramatic entrance into the Psychic-type is pretty solid. The cool thing about Aerowing is that you only need to flip a coin if you want to. This makes it essentially function as a flat upgrade over the similar Dive Bomb that Fossil Moltres was stuck with.

It also only needs Colorless energy to attack, so you can slot this into any deck that needs to one-shot a Promo Mewtwo or Fossil Muk. And 90 HP on a Basic is always nice.

Grade: 7/10

Celebi isn't terrible, but it's only really good at being a minor nuisance. It has a 50/50 chance of denying your opponent the prize when it's knocked out, so it could maybe be used in a deck that needs to buy a few turns.

The obvious problem is that you can already buy several turns in the Neo formats with any random Baby. Its underwhelming attack does ignore resistance, though, for whatever that might be worth to you.

Grade: 4/10

As you can imagine, these cards don't sweep any of the Neo formats off their feet. There are a few fringe playables here, but that's insulting for a type that was once famous for cards like Base Alakazam, Promo Mewtwo, and Jungle Mr. Mime.

Then again, Psychic would go on to be one of the most dominant types in the TCG in the future, thanks to fan favorites like Mewtwo EX and Gardevoir. So maybe it's okay for the type to lay low every now and then.