Cards Of The Week #5

Laboon (EB01-048)

For a good while black cards in the one peice tcg fell into 2 categories: The ones with effects that KO characters depending on their cost, and the ones with effects that decrease costs. Thus making it easier to KO stronger characters. Laboon here falls into the second category and it's frankly one of the best cards at this job. It has a standard 5000 power for a 4 cost character and can also be used in hand with the standard +1000 counter. You can rest him every turn to decrease 1 of your opponent's character cost by 4.

The decrease is very significant, and you force your opponent to consider dealing with Laboon otherwise you can reap the effect turn after turn if you want. Even so, that "good while" I was talking about was a few years ago. Standards for cards are higher now and just working as a combo piece isn't what it used to be. This card needs to be paired up with other cards to score a KO meaning it's not a staple in many black decks.

Even if your deck did focus on KOs through effects it still isn't a guarantee you'd run this card necessarily. For these reasons I can't give it a fully high rating but it's a card you should keep in mind depedning on your deck.

SaberWolf's Rating: 3.8/5

Shanks (OP01-120)

When Romance Dawn, the first one piece tcg booster set released this Shanks was one of the two possible secret rares from the set. It was also the really good one of the two as a great high cost character in any red deck. Stats were and still are solid and it has Rush. You can never really go wrong with this effect. When we get into the second effect though we're getting into hit or miss territory. Small Blockers with 2000 or less power can't be used when this Shanks attacks.

In the earliest one piece formats, this was certainly a pretty big deal. But even then it could be situational, and following more current formats it's more situational than ever. One Piece is a rotation based tcg (and I highly support that) but it also had the excellent idea to make every manga rare card eternally available in the format. This Shanks card comes as a manga rare (it was in fact the first one) so it can still be used in the standard format even though it released in Romance Dawn.

In todays standards, it really isn't all that special. It's not the only cost 9 red character anymore, we have lots of other high cost red characters now that also have Rush and also have generally more useful secondary effects compared to Shanks here. Really, when you compare this card with Shanks from OP09 there isn't much you can discuss. Still, the Rush effect still gives him a lot of automatic merit since he is a high power character after all; so despite what I said he's still not a useless card if it's all you have in hand.

SaberWolf's Rating: 3.9/5