Who among us doesn't enjoy a good old lava slug? Of course you do; that's one of the many things that makes Pokémon such a joy to be involved with. However, while we all might like Slugma and Magcargo, which is arguably a snail, we think a few more people are going to find themselves wanting to run the new Magcargo ex from the upcoming Crimson Haze set.
Let's get stuck into the nitty-gritty. Slugma is a basic Pokemon that has 80 HP, and just one ability called Hot Magma, which costs two Energy, and does 20 damage, but also makes it so that your opponent's active Pokémon gets burned. Burn is a useful status effect because it can pile on damage, but it's more of a nice bonus than a reliable gain here.
The real star of the show is Magcargo ex, which evolves from Slugma, and has an HP of 270. Magcargo ex also has the Hot Magma ability, but it deals 70 damage now, along with the burn.
The real attraction is Ground Burn, which costs three energy and has each player discard the top card of their deck. While this could result in some synergies on its own, this already makes the attack stronger because Ground Burn does an additional 140 damage for each Energy card discarded because of this attack. That means, if you get lucky, you can dole out a massive 420 damage with just three energy, which is enough to one-shot most threats on sight.
Magcargo ex has a Tera ability, too, which makes it so that as long as Magcargo is on your Bench, it can't take any damage to it from any Pokémon attacks, whether they're from your opponent or your own Pokémon. It's a fairly niche ability, but it could have some use if you're planning on salting the Earth with your monster attacks and just going wild. Either way, though, this spoiler from Pokebeach is worth paying attention to.
We're pretty interested in the energy discard aspect here, as it ties into the Infernape leak in a cool way. Both discard Energy cards but with a slightly different method to it. It could make for a fun deck as long as you've got ways to recur Energy cards, like with the Pachirisu promo from CoroCoro Ichiban! Magazine.
Crimson Haze is going to be coming to the West in the form of Twilight Masquerade in May, so keep an eye on these spoilers to see what we can expect.