History of Floatzel in the TCG Pokemon Trading Card Game Overview!

1/9/2025

Just the second print down and Floatzel was already downgrading here as Great Encounters Floatzel is objectively worse in every department. I’m not even gonna waste time here, both attacks are worse overall and its stats are worse too.

Hello everyone and welcome to another Pokemon TCG Overview. Deputing in the DP era Floatzel stood out as a water pokemon in terms of its very high speed, matching Starmie. Its solid attack complimented the high speed almost turning it into a physical attacking version of Starmie but not quite, as it didn’t share too many powerful coverage moves at least to make use of its attack stat. Besides that, I don’t really have much to add; my feelings for the Floatzel line are somewhat similar with the Hariyama line I already covered. I think they’re nice additions in the pokemon world but I’d never say they’re some of my favourite water pokemon. More importantly and rather sadly, the Floatzel line is another line that is mostly underwhelming in the tcg. Normally I’d say it’s not as bad as the Furret line or Skarmory, pokemon that are even older but after examining all its cards it might just be the most underwhelming pokemon line I reviewed in this series so far.

For Buizel, it has 3 Japanese exclusive promos all 3 known as Samiya’s Buizel. The first one comes as a Meiji Chocolate promo and is the only Buizel to have a poke-body. No other Buizel ever had a power or ability. The effect isn’t anything too unique, it just grants Buizel free retreat if it has a water energy on. The second promo is from the Movie Commemoration VS Pack, Sea’s Manaphy and the last one is from a Shogakukan Elementary School magazine. The only English promo we have is from the wonderful DP Value Packs more commonly just referred to as blister packs. It’s basically a holo alternate art version of the original Buizel from the first Diamond and Pearl set. I suppose Buizel from Mysterious Treasures is also somewhat unique being one of the few pokemon to have a berry effect, in this case the Chesto Berry will always ensure that Buizel wakes up at the end of the turn if it is asleep.

On the other hand, Floatzel doesn’t have any promos of any kind. Being the early route water pokemon that it is in the DP video games it makes a natural debut in the first Diamond and Pearl set and while it’s not that special it’s not a complete weakling at least. 90 HP is a good number to hit for a stage 1 in that period and Water Gun is an okay attack at least. It does 40 for 2 but will do 20 more damage for every extra water energy on Floatzel. The damage maxes out at 80 but what’s annoying about this card is that Screw Tail also costs 2 energy almost making it a pointless attack. Yeah the requirements aren’t exactly the same and you get to flip a coin to discard your opponent’s energies but realistically you’ll go for the extra damage Water Gun does.

The next duo of Floatzel cards are basically the only special cards it ever got and even these were a completely wasted opportunity. As the main pokemon of Wake, it made sense for Floatzel to get some SP pokemon in the era and they even went the extra mile with a Lv. X. The regular Floatzel GL is one of the worst SP pokemon you can think of especially when you consider it’s one of the holo ones from Rising Rivals. If you read its attacks you may wonder “this isn’t bad for DP” and you’re right, the problem is you can’t take advantage of Energy Gain in any way, one of the best cards that made SP pokemon so much faster, and as a result stronger. Giant Wave would have been so much better if it could utilize Energy Gain even if Floatzel did 40 for 2 instead of 50.

Floatzel GL Lv. X has a few more things going for it being a Lv. X but it’s also cursed being unable to make use of Energy Gain with its attack. Did they really do this on purpose and were fully aware? The HP buff isn’t the best when you compare it with some other SP Lv. X cards but the free retreat is great and makes up for it. I’d say it’s much needed as without it you wouldn’t be able to reap the effect of Water Rescue as easy. With Water Rescue, every time your water pokemon get KOed by damage you can instantly add them back in your hand along with every attached card. This excludes Floatzel GL for obvious potential broken loop combos. This is pretty nice as you can get back all energies giving you few worries of ever running out and any tool cards back for reuse.

This effect is great because if you build your deck correctly around it will save you deck space on usually staple cards like Night Maintenance and perhaps extra energies. The free retreat lets you access the effect easily as you can level up and then retreat on the bench. But, this is where all the positives end. Even on the bench this pokemon wouldn’t be very safe if your opponent used any Luxray GL Lv. X. With the x2 lightning weakness, this card will always get killed in one shot and there’s not much you can do about it. What’s also really bad is the Energy Cyclone attack. For an attack that’s incompatible with Energy Gain is very weak for being so slow and the costs aren’t easy to stomach either. You need to return quite a few energies from the hand back in the deck to hit for damage that’s worse than even common attacks on non meta pokemon. Seriously, if you return 3 energies from the hand to the deck, you’re only hitting for 60 damage. Never mind that Bibarel can do this without any costs, I assure you you can find plenty of pokemon in the era that can hit 60 damage for 3. Now, as an SP pokemon this card will still be better than most Floatzel cards anyway as it can still take advantage of Poke Turn among other SP themed cards.

Supreme Victors was the very next set after Rising Rivals and it also gave Floatzel a print only it was another really, really bad one. In fact, I’m just going to say this now: Kill all your hopes for any improved or decent Floatzel cards. They’re only going to get even worse than the mediocre ones we’ve already seen. This card is horrendously bad from every angle there is literally nothing to analyze. It would be mega weak even if it was printed as a stage 1 in Base Set from the Wizards days, that’s how bad we’re talking about here.

Floatzel from Unleashed could actually fool you for a second when you read its a mini energy acceleration poke-power but it’s a short lived illusion. To bring up Stormfront Bibarel again, it could hit 60 for 2 energies so Floatzel letting you attach a free water on it with its effect didn’t matter when your attack does the same damage for a third energy. Not to mention Bibarel had more HP, a potentially useful poke-body and another usable attack. You could maybe use this card as a stepping stone for Energy Switch plays but it’d be so inefficient don’t even bother thinking about it. Feraligatr Prime is superior to this card from almost every aspect so let’s just move on.

As the pattern goes for these not very popular indifferent pokemon, prints dry up after their debuting generation and what hurts even more for Floatzel here is that it didn’t even have a good run in its home gen. At least Cradily, Hariyama and Shiftry had some good cards in their home gen and then started to see only bad cards from there.

Both gen 5 and gen 6 only had one Floatzel card each and they’re wasted filler as you’d expect outside of their artwork. Dragons Exalted Floatzel is a mostly weaker Stormfront Bibarel that’s 4 years newer and Flashfire Floatzel is too slow and weak to be any good. Evolving into a stage 1 and attacking to recover some pokemon back in your deck is a recipe for you to lose games when Super Rod, Sacred Ash and Brock exist in the same era. It’s even more comical as Sacred Ash comes in the same set as this card. The designers were really taking the piss in the open as I’ve seen time and time again.

Sun and Moon saw 2 Floatzel cards close to each other in Shining Legends and Ultra Prism. Rule Box meta cards saw so many boosts and buffs in this era that these filler cards could do nothing but be invisible in that period so that’s how I’m going to treat them. I will only point out that these 2 gen 7 prints along with the gen 6 print from Flashfire is when the weakness changed from lightning to grass. This also applied in the Buizels from those sets.

Sword and Shield is also a repeat of what I just said, 2 prints, one in Shining Fates and the other in Brilliant Stars. The weakness changed back to lighting but both of them terrible cards. To hit 60 for 2 energies 14 years later is embarrassing, insulting and unbelievable that I seriously cannot fathom how some people even give me flak when I criticize the designers other than they’re blind fan boys that will defend nearly anything as long as it has the pokemon logo on. Even Floatify makes this card a slower Dark Explorers Sableye and while I can forgive that since Sableye was such a b**ch, I cannot forgive the rest of the horrible package.

To finish off this underwhelming TCG Overview (seriously this is no doubt the worst thus far) we have our current Scarlet and Violet era and Floatzel has also seen at least 2 cards so far. One comes from the base set and the other from Obsidian Flames. You already know I’m going to say they’re crap so let’s just skim this over. Terrible stats, terrible attacks and that’s it. They copy pasted the 60 for 2 again taking the piss to the maximum (worse than a card from 15 years ago now) and Swirling Tail is too much of a gimmick to be taken seriously.

And that’s that. 14 different Floatzel cards so far and all of them either terrible or SERIOUSLY terrible. The original DP print from 2007 is pretty average but when you look at how bad the rest of the cards are in their respective eras it really is incredible how backwards the rest of the cards went. I’m finding it hard to come up with any closing words here so if Floatzel is your favourite pokemon I’m sorry it got this tcg treatment (I didn’t do anything wrong though) Even the worst tcg pokemon I reviewed have at least 1 really solid card at worst but I suppose Floatzel wasn’t even fated for that.

Thank you guys for reading either way and let’s all pray for better days for Floatzel, or rather better cards for once.