e-Card probably would probably be better remembered and mentioned in the same way if WOTC hadn't been rushing through the sets so they could print out more Base Set – it was a clean break from all prior sets and the game designers did a great job of setting up the basis of a new game format, and the EX era really took that and ran with it.
I don't know much about the BW block but everything about it seems pretty unimpressive. After several years of successfully managing a pretty dynamic game format, Pokémon SP was a bit of a misstep in reintroducing an emphasis on "big Basics", but the BW era reintroduced multi-prize cards in the most degenerate manner possible, and it feels like the game hasn't been able to recover from this, as the the game has addressed the problem they introduced was to sharpen the intensity of the game's power creep. This is something I see brought up in criticisms of the today's game fairly often, and as a long-time collector, I find the comically ballooning numbers to be one of the more annoying things about modern cards.
