Hi, guys. This thread talks about the potential of Random Receiver as a replacement for VS Seeker, if it is not reprinted in Sun&Moon.
Not trying to rake you over the coals, but it is
way too early to worry about such a thing. If we want to discuss it for funsies, sure, but odds are next year the set rotation will happen September 1st, after the World Championships have wrapped up. We don't know what the card pool will be, let alone the actual metagame, and as others have stated it is possible we'll see a reprint of it before then. Now if we don't get a surprise late
XY: Black Star Promo of it, then yeah next year's rotation is almost guaranteed to axe it from Standard play, as the most recent
VS Seeker printing is from
XY: Roaring Skies.
I think all of you reading this one know that this card is sought potential in Expanded before. But in this VS Seeker dependent meta, will this be a substitute for the VS Seeker? For those who didn't know about Random Receiver, this searches an immediate Supporter Card from your deck.
What do you think?
Random Receiver is
not VS Seeker; even if
Random Receiver proves worth running once
VS Seeker leaves Standard play, you'll still have to build your deck in a totally different manner. As you mention,
Random Receiver has been a good card before, specifically at a time when decks were running few different Supporters; not few Supporter cards but running high counts (3 or 4) of just a few (no more than three) major search/draw Supporters. Not unlike now, even though a deck might run 12-16 Supporters, it didn't actually
need to use that many most matches; instead the extras were there because missing your Supporter usage for the turn usually hurt you badly, especially early game. As such, a deck that needed 12 draw supporters could instead run four
Random Receiver and just eight draw Supporters. Some of the fastest decks during the BW-era would run four
Professor Juniper and four
Random Receiver.
VS Seeker on the other hand tends to thrive based upon variety in Supporters, and gives you an additional usage of them. The area where they do see a little overlap is in the Legacy Format of the PTCGO. Legacy is the HS-era releases (plus Call of Legends) and BW-era releases, so
VS Seeker is
not legal but
Junk Arm is: a
Random Receiver in your discard means if you need to (and have the discard fodder),
Junk Arm becomes an out to a Supporter. It helps that most of the time, the bulk of your Supporters are
Professor Juniper,
Professor Oak's New Theory, and/or
N. While all are different usually two out of those three will do the job.