If you thought we were done with Rocket’s Pokemon ex, you’re in for a surprise: Rocket’s Raikou ex was the secret rare in the Deoxys set. Honestly, it wasn’t all that great, even though it could be a bit disruptive and had decent power. So many things seemed to just do what it wanted to do but better. Still, there was some potential with Thunderous Blow, so it wasn’t anywhere near awful.
Rocket’s Raikou ex had 100 HP, which was not what you wanted on a Pokemon-ex. It was left open to Desert Ruins, and having a Poke-Power let Cursed Stone work as well. A Fighting Weakness added to the problems, with Medicham ex and Nidoqueen being a couple of examples of good Fighting-types. The Retreat Cost was 2, which was quite average. Switch or Warp Point could be nice, but wasn’t required.
Lightning Burst was an interesting Poke-Power that had your opponent switch Pokemon whenever a Darkness Energy card was attached from the hand to Rocket’s Raikou ex. The downside? The opponent chose which Benched Pokemon to switch in. This didn’t usually help as much as one might think, though decks that liked to have a low amount of Benched Pokemon could have some issues here.
Thunderous Blow did 40 damage for a Lightning and two Colorless Energies, not very good. That said, the numbers could rise quite quickly, as 10 more damage was added for each Lightning Energy attached to Rocket’s Raikou ex. Of course, Special Darkness Energy worked too, due to its own effect, but having any Lightning Energy work for that purpose was nice and commonly turned a weak attack into something dealing 60-70 damage. It wasn’t incredible, but was a pretty strong attack and was the type of damage that let Zapdos ex get by (though Zapdos ex, of course, had much more going for it).
It was actually hard to put Rocket’s Raikou ex in a deck. When using it, you usually were wishing you used something like Zapdos ex instead. A Basic Lightning-type attacker was tempting and pretty rare though, so there could be a bit of use for this, probably in DX-On where Zapdos ex wasn’t available. This honestly wasn’t that good, but at least it could do some solid damage for a reasonable cost. If you really, really needed that in a Lightning-type attacker, Rocket’s Raikou ex existed, but you probably had better options.
