GENF-JP031
Poké Dra 「ポケ・ドラ」
FIRE/Dragon - Effect/3/200/100
When this card is Normal Summoned, you can add 1 "Poké Dra" from your Deck to your hand.
Poké Dra is a neat little Dragon Pokémon coming to Yu-Gi-Oh! in Generation Force, the first Yu-Gi-Oh! ZeXal booster pack.
Its a nifty little floater that replaces itself upon Normal Summon reminiscent of the Gadgets. It has a small body, however, this works to its advantage. The card is prime Red-Eyes Darkness Metal fodder.
Way back when Vice Dragon was first released it was heralded as the saviour of Dragon builds; championed as the "best" fodder for Darkness Metals summon. This soon proved to be wrong. People soon found that Vice Dragon's inability to bring anything new to the game without overextending and costing them 2 cards in hand made it a subpar addition to the dragon deck. Yet people clung to it because they did not want to have to commit the same play with another dragon whilst losing their normal summon; The obvious flaw of which is that you lose advantage as well as your normal summon, but Poké Dra fixes this.
Flat out I'm going to run 2 copies. The first will get summoned and RFGed for Darkness Metal and replaces itself; you've given up a normal summon but lost no advantage. Thanks to Darkness Metal Dragon that normal summon loss is negligible in advantage. The flaw of Hopeless Dragon I always said was that the ability to drop 2500+ATK monsters was outdone by Synchro spam decks, which unlike Hopeless Dragons had good effects to match their size. Likewise the flaw of Darkness Metal in the past has been that it couldn't be summoned without costing advantage as there were no other dragons that floated upon summon; once again Poké Dra fixes this.
The second Poké Dra is prime fodder for either Genesis Dragon or Dragon Ravine discards. If you run 3 Poké Dra with the hopes of reshuffling them with Genesis or getting a full plus chain off thats neat but then you'd have to normal summon two of them or you'd be wasting them; also you couldn't pitch the 2nd one for anything as it'd make the third dead. Its free advantage but I don't like getting tied down by advantage chains. Running 2 gives you the free Darkness Metal summons whilst also giving you flexibility in how you choose to use that advantage given by the Poké Dra.
Once Poké Dra is in grave Poké's small size begins to benefit it as its able to be recurred with Debris Dragon to make Ancient Fairy Dragon (helping our GK and Dragunity matchup), Exploder Dragonwing (Just generally really good), or Black Rose Dragon (helping our LSS matchup among others).
Since its Level 3 and self replacing it also lets you Exceed Summon under Ultimate Offering if you're wierd but honestly Revise Dragon is not worth including unnecessary cards into your deck for.
Anyway thats it for Poké Dra. I considered reviewing Dodger Dragon but since everyone is buzzing about that I decided to give a little sunshine to the monster I feel is better but may slip under the radar.
