It's nice to block Marnie, but setting up a stage one to do so is rarely useful. I don't like how the card designers are trying to stop bad format design with direct counters like this and the greedent that stops energy removal. The better solution is obviously to design the format in such a way that these cards don't become broken. I mean, even just a year ago crushing hammer and Marnie weren't big issues and that was mainly because decks were more consistent and fewer decks were reliant on multiple manual attachments.
I think a good way of addressing Marnie would be to print an alternative to it (*cough* Cynthia *cough*) and to give us more on-board draw. We currently only really have cinccino and you need multipleof them to get somewhere. Maybe something like abyssal hand octillery or even cosmic power claydol? Something on the power level of claydol would make games less "high-rolly " and would promote playing evolving pokemon, even in big basic decks.
This would also require some universal ball search card because that's really what's preventing 2-2 evolution lines in basic decks. LucMetal/Zacian would probably have a bronzong variant if you wouldn't need to warp your deck with 4 pokecomm, a terrible card when you only play 12 or so pokemon. I don't know if I want ultra ball back before quick ball rotates, because that would make big basic decks insane, but there must be some way of balancing universal ball search.
I realize that this has become a rant about standard so I might as well continue. The SwSh T1 rule was meant to slow down the game, but it didn't for 1 main reason: They didn't change the game design accordingly. Most decks set up in the same way but were now reliant on using dedenne on T1. This created more feel bad scenarios with bad discards but also discouraged single prizers and evolution decks. (Single prizers don't want dedenne on the bench and evolutions don't want to discard stuff) But the primitive big basics didn't mind, they wanted to use dedenne on turn one anyway!
The only way to make this rule fair is in a format where all decks are equally punished. There was a similar rule back in gen 3, but back then almost all decks evolved and there was no dedenne. They would have had to change the design MASSIVELY to fix all the issues of the rule, but they obviously couldn't. The only good thing the rule did was making going first or second a choice, but I would rather mindlessly go first if that would lead to a better format.
If they really wanted to make the decision of going first or not more skilled, they should have let you see your hand before the choice. A good hand with a quick ball and an energy? Go first. A bunch of trash and a research? Go second!
