Let me clarify that banning Mewtwo EX was a general opinion from what I've read. I do not believe it should have been banned.
Understood. I was just explaining how the card, even when it was horribly overpowered, owed it to some other problem cards in the format... not unlike the situation with
Seismitoad-EX and
Lysandre's Trump Card though there are some key differences there.
The next bits are going to risk sounding argumentative... well I am putting forth an argument but not because I think it would be fun or anything, but because I can't tell what you are presenting as "fact" and what you are presenting as "opinion", including a few bits that seem to be stated as facts but clearly contradict what I myself know. Not that I couldn't be wrong.
I do not believe that LTC should have been banned. In my experience with ccg's/tcg's there is no reason to ban a card when a text errata or restriction would do the trick just as easily. Especially in today's world where almost everyone has a phone with wi-fi to access the current rulings and errata on cards.
You are free to disagree with banning
Lysandre's Trump Card, but I disagree with the notion that banning is
never an option; perhaps a few games use it too readily but the ones I have played instead use it too sparingly or just right. Mistakes happen and when they do, it is important to preserve game balance over keeping something problematic legal to play.
In this particular case I have yet to hear how an erratum (usually reserved for when the error is in printing, not game balance) could legitimately address all the issues resolved by it being banned
and still be as simple to communicate and understand as a ban, let alone how restriction would help when most decks (including the ones making the best use of it) only ran a single copy if
Lysandre's Trump Card. I suppose both an erratum that included a built in restriction would deal with most of the issues, but it wouldn't deal with them all
and would ultimately be more complicated than simply banning the card... especially as there appear to be no plans to reprint
Lysandre's Trump Card (something that helps an erratum to "stick").
I myself think the Base-Neo is the best series. That was when not only were you able to run a stage 2 deck effectively and without major repercussions but it was actually encouraged (bar a few different decks like Haymaker's). Where my water deck could go with a turn 2 or turn 3 Blastoise, combined with Oak and Bill, to effectively dominate my games instead of EX's, most of whom are not really basics but are treated as such, to say nothing about the power curve on EX's ie; higher damage for small or medium amounts of energy comparable to regular basics and stage 1 and HP that is almost double that of even stage 2 Pokémon.
While I was not a part of the competitive scene during this time, I was already late in my High School career (and in fact started college during the time before "Modified" was instituted and while
Neo Genesis was still the latest expansion). I'm a little fuzzy during
Gym Heroes and
Gym Challenge being new because - as this was when I went online only at school to kill time after class or for school projects - I believed one of the other players (who at least appeared knowledgeable) that due to the layout change seen in those sets, they would be a "separate" game from what came before. Yes, I was an idiot and sadly it wasn't the last time I was that foolish... but I have enough first hand knowledge on top of later research to know the basics of the metagame.
It is very important to remember that our recollections of any past format remember the state of the Pokémon community at the time. For example, before the general Pokémon fad crashed (not quite sure when but I think it was around the release of the
Neo Genesis) you had a
card shortage. I do not have the exact start/stop dates handy and even if I did it varied quite a bit according to region (especially internationally). This meant a lot of cards that weren't technically competitive performed as if they were simply because people ran what they had and they didn't have much. Combine this with the information shortage of the time and we saw some truly bizarre results that later testing verified were annihilated by a few key decks.
During the
Base Set through
Neo series of sets that Stage 2 Pokémon were at best a little more playable than the best are now, with a few used through exploits in the system or simply were amazingly powerful or both. Now there were plenty of Basic and Stage 1 Pokémon that were also just not worth using, but as a guesstimate favoring easy numbers I would say that 10% of the available card pool made up the competitive metagame, with about 5% of that being non-Evolving Basic Pokémon, 3% of that being fully Evolved Stage 1 Pokémon and 2% being Stage 2 Pokémon. Raindance decks was indeed one of the top decks, but it was the exception, not the rule and the fact that it centered around
Base Set Blastoise should be quite telling. As you included the
Neo sets, in Unlimited play your
Blastoise deck should have struggled against "Mind Games" decks, which had
Neo Genesis Sneasel backed by
Neo Genesis Slowking... the first and second cards ever banned from Modified, for the record.
Over in Modified, where
Base Set Blastoise was illegal, Stage 2 cards were quite viable. The cost for this was a much slower format, especially prior to
Neo Genesis Slowking being banned. It was also horribly flippy; yes on par with on how
Seismitoad-EX has been played until (possibly) the recent
Lysandre's Trump Card banning forced it to change. Almost all decks would rely on "Baby" Pokémon, a kind of "sub-Stage" of Basic that had special rules text on it, including "the Baby Rule" that forced anything attacking a Baby Pokémon to flip a coin; if "tails" that players' turn ended without an attack. They only had 30 HP, but they were so hard to hit and even if you did, this was the format with
Focus Band, a Pokémon Tool that triggered if the equipped Pokémon would be KOed via damage. You'd then flip a coin and if "heads" your Pokémon was
not KOed but instead would have 10 HP remaining (and
Focus Band would discard itself). Before it was banned you would have
Neo Genesis Sneasel and
Slowking with all their coin flips as well.
As for double HP maybe on one or two but its usually a 50% bump (sometimes less). Also most of the issue seems to be with "pacing" and not "raw power". Here there are more (and blatant exceptions), but the general thing is that especially after factoring in available Energy acceleration you end up with big, Basic attackers that function as the main attacker for a deck sometimes on a players' very first turn. That's a problem. If more of them had no low Energy attacks or the attacks weren't so good, it would slow the pace of the game down allowing time for Evolutions to hit the field before Pokémon-EX are racking up the KOs. Well, except that too many
non-Pokémon-EX are similarly overpowered and too quickly paced.
Honestly in some ways I think EX's were the worst thing to happen to Pokémon from a play stance though I know I'm in the minority on this point.
I understand why you might feel that way, but don't mistake the symptoms for the disease. Pokémon-EX aren't a problem because of the Pokémon-EX mechanic but specifically because so many of them ended up being overpowered... and overpowered cards are a
separate issue. That was why I went into a bit of detail on
Mewtwo-EX. I actually do like the Pokémon-EX mechanic, but wish it could have remained how it originally appeared until
BW: Legendary Treasures. Then it seemed restricted to the equivalents of video game Legendary Pokémon and the cost of an extra Prize, inability to access certain pieces of support and existance of certain counter cards helped balance out those Pokémon being strong like they are in the source material.
I hope that clears things up a bit. Your favorite time in the game is your favorite time in the game. If you don't like a mechanic, you don't like a mechanic. I only wished to help you sort out some facts that weren't facts but were being presented to support your view. Kind of like how I used to hate how
Beast Wars used so many cheesy one-liners but when I re-watched G1 I realized that was pretty typical of Transformers in general and I was just looking for excuses. That let me identify the real reason I didn't care for
Beast Wars (setting it on pre-historic Earth).
