@DragonFang101
First, my apologies for the length. I am
not trying to bury you under my responses. I'm just not sure how to trim this down because I don't know what it is one of us is seeing that the other does not.
Originally you asserted that
Birgette couldn't cause problems because
any deck could benefit from her, unlike
Forest of Giant Plants, which only benefited Pokémon capable of Evolving from Grass-Types. I responded by pointing out that was not a logical assumption; looking at one of the other banned cards -
Lysandre's Trump Card - we see something that could be easily played in any deck.
You are now clarifying your claim, wanting a card to be universally beneficial to all decks; I am glad you are doing this. You need to refine it further because your argument and conclusion still do not hold. I didn't split hairs by pointing out that
any deck could technically run something like
Forest of Giant Plants: it would just be a bad play in
most of them, as the deck could not use the effect. Even though not all decks benefit equally from
Lysandre's Trump Card, and that some were countered by it, doesn't stop it from being a universal card. Examine your own bullet points:
- Eliminates one of your opponent’s victory conditions (running out of cards in your deck)
- Allows repeated use of powerful Trainer cards
- Allows drawing through your deck quickly with minimal repercussions
- Extends the time of battles
Night March actually benefits from all of these; it is something you do
not list - keeping certain cards in your discard pile - where Night March suffers. Even then, you had to use
Lysandre's Trump Card right (or get lucky) to actually have it sufficiently counter Night March; with everything else not on the field returning to the deck alongside your Pokémon, a properly built and played Night March deck might not even be slowed down, let alone stopped, by
Lysandre's Trump Card. If the Lost Zone mechanic had not been eliminated,
Lysandre's Trump Card would have only changed mill, instead of ruining it (not that we had an awful lot of worthwhile mill decks at the time).
I don't think I've played a TCG that had something that truly benefited every deck equally; even if it was intended, seems like someone will try and popularize something the designers didn't intend and so would-be universal support isn't truly universal.
Slowking (
Neo Genesis 14/111) came close; I'm not sure if
any deck strategy in the Pokémon TCG does not benefit from preventing an opponent from using his or her Trainer cards. Part of why it was banned was that, even though it was a Psychic-Type Stage 1, almost
every competitive deck was running it. "Almost" may only have been because some were slow to adopt it, as archetypes that had previously not included it began to shortly before it was banned.
If you want to know what "broken" cards have in common, you have to look at what they actually do to the Pokémon TCG and people's enjoyment of it. "Raw power" isn't even always the issue; it is how the various game mechanics interact with each other within the card pool, and what that does to deck composition, match length, player enjoyment, etc. Working for just one deck/Stage/Type/etc. or working for all of them doesn't consistently prove something is "broken" or not, to the point it isn't even a good rule of thumb.
