Right now, the state of the game is pandering to new players. We saw this with big basics, then we saw it again with tag teams, and most recently, vmaxes. These new cards speed up the game which reduces importance of nuance and techs, and prioritize consistency and hitting heads on crushing hammer. I don't think this is a very good idea to help new players join in and to keep the attention of old players, where it is essentially failing at both. The lack of a ranked ladder on PTCGO and the vide variety of skill in the game makes it really hard for a new player to judge where they are skill-wise. A recent example that I found recently was with my brother's friend. My brother's friend recently got into the game and he thinks he is "really good," as he keeps beating the bots on the "competitive ladder." We all know that these bots are incredibly bad at the game, but PTCGO insists on pretending that they are 'good'. The friend even went so far as to say that he could probably beat my brother, which is definitely no happening unless he got really lucky. My brother won a regionals, and when asked, the friend says that he played a theme deck with some GX pokemon in it. Dumbing down the game leads to this confusion of newer players who think they are good but really aren't, and it makes the current competitive community feel overlooked, as if they don't exist. The advent of these big 3 prize pokemon also help dumb down the game, such as Eternatus Vmax. With etern, all you need to do is get an eternatus into play, bench pokemon, and attach energy. You have basically no other attacking options to you, the only move you can use is dead end or whatever its called. There is no chance to make unique and interesting plays, and it has 1 glaring weakness: crushing hammer. Every eternatus player hates this card, and for good measure. It's luck based, and it is super OP when games take 3 turns to play. you basically delete a turn from your opponent, and they can't do anything about it because there is no other option you can choose. If you attach to anything other than eternatus, you are just wasting your time. This makes both new players and old players upset at the game and here is why. If you are new, and you just invested 100 of your hard earned dollars into an eternatus deck, you expect to have fun and win games, right? It's hard to have fun when your opponent can just lock you out of the game by playing a card with a coin flip. It is inherently unfun to lose to something involving coin flips, no matter what skill level you are. You never play against some random kid playing a bunch of hammers and lose and think, "hmm. i got absolutely outskilled that game. I think my main mistake was letting him flip heads on hammers. Maybe if i try making him flip tails instead, i will do better." Nobody thinks like that, because there is nothing you can do about it. Its really kinda sad that TPCI thinks that the game needs to be dumbed down as well. In a way, having a more difficult game is better for new players. If they have to learn matchups and how to sequence and other stuff, well guess what! they are learning. If you think they will get bored of the game if its too hard, then how will they not get bored of a game that's too easy? if 2 kids at the playground are both new to the game and all of a sudden one of them brings along ADPZ, its not going to be fun for either player because the same exact thing happens every single game, and there is nothing that the other player can do about it. If the game is more complicated, then tech cards would matter more and there could actually be something that you could do about your opponent, then the game would be more fun and more fair for both sides, where you have to play the tech and then play around the tech and play around the counter for the tech etc. If the game is harder, then the kid could actually notice themselves improving, while if the game is easy then they just have to sit down for 30 minutes with a broken deck and then win a whole bunch of tournaments for basically free.
yeah, such as whether to run more hammers or more tag team vmax dedennes.
