What made me laugh was that I was in one of those photos. Seeing that there were a lot of them, most of them crowd scenes, I would've figured I'd end up in at least one. There are probably more, but I didn't feel like playing Where's Waldo with them. (Or Where's Wally if you live outside the United States.) I feel glad that I used a rogue deck I created myself and ended up in the middle rankings, considering I had no clue how Magmortar, Gardevoir, or Gallade worked until now as I never had the opportunity to face one myself.
The reason why we have a lot more people in the Masters division than the others (sometimes combined) is because, as explained earlier, little kids don't have as much of an interest playing the card game the way it was supposed to be played as and treat them as toys. (Technically, they ARE toys, but I mean in a more traditional sense.) There's also the lingering notion of "Gotta catch 'em all!," even though that catchphrase disappeared after FireRed/LeafGreen: In the early days of the TCG, nobody really played it except me and a few other people. Most just collected and thought they were just the Pokémon version of trading cards. People strived to get the whole Base Set, then Jungle, then Fossil, then everybody lost interest in the TCG after that. Many didn't even know there was a card game to go with it, and the ones that knew never cared to read the rules and made up their own. (Much of them turned out to be variations of War, except with the Pokémon's HP rather than the value of the suit.) As a matter of fact, some kids cut up their Alakazams and Blastoises and played pretend with them, and I'm sure the kids nowadays still do that.
Pokémon USA probably minds not one bit, however, as they still get the money regardless of what the buyers do with the cards.
