>>29063522My point was that you shouldn't take statements like that too seriously from him considering the quality of his other analysis.
Either way, he's talking about the first rotation, TR-on, which a lot of people complained about despite it not being any more unbalanced than Base Set.
You had pic related in Tier 0, just like with Haymaker in Base Set. It was so good because it had the most HP in the game at the time on top of being able to do nuts damage, meaning it could OHKO the format and the format couldn't OHKO it back.
Its recycle mechanic also let you abuse Misty's Wrath in a format where all the good staples had just rotated, meaning most decks had to resort to Elm or Cleffa, which was the second problem: you had a lot of coinflips in the meta. Every deck ran Cleffa or Tyrogue to counter Cleffa. Then Focus Band could decide a game on a coinflip.
If I remember correctly, Jason actually played back then with a Typhlosion deck, which was one of the Tier 2/rogue options you could run with since Cinnabar Gym removed weakness.
The thing is, though, that the format wasn't that bad at all. Sure you had a Tier 0 deck and sure there were a lot of coinflips, but we had just removed most of Base Set's huge cancer cards like Energy Removal, and for the first time we had a shitload of Stage 1/2 Pokemon competing in the format whenever Feraligatr wasn't involved. The game had actually slowed down mechanically to a point where it could be played the way they had in mind when it was first designed, letting it be mechanically diverse instead of just lmao big basic haymaker donks. It paved the way for Gen 3 and 4's golden era.
