You can apply this to a lot of Pokémon. Many of them seem to suffer from this exact same curse, like Starmie, Weezing, and Persian. Over the years, they've seen almost no play, regardless of which ones they were. While ones like Machamp and Gengar had a lot of favoritism and nearly always get amazing cards.
You can pretty much tell if a card is going to be good 20% of the time by figuring out which Pokémon it is; if any of its iterations were very competitive in the past, chances are this one's gonna be at least somewhat playable.
