>>36700477Gen 3 was the first moment of stability in the TCG's history, since Gen 1 and 2 were horrible mistakes for ironically opposite reasons. The game slowly got significantly better over time after that, peaking during the DP block, specifically Stormfront.
Then, suddenly the entire Platinum block was underwhelming as fuck, and we only realized why when HGSS hit. We went from almost every card in the set being as complicated as pic related in Gen 4, to literally only a SINGLE Pokemon in HGSS having more than two attacks/abilities (Donphan Prime). Almost every Pokemon in HGSS had either no text at all for their attacks, or a single sentence at most. The game shifted from most of your power coming from your bench, to Supporters dominating the utility metagame thanks to power cards like Oak's New Theory. The game went from being complex and having a slew of strategies you could implement, to a hilariously simplified version of what the game's supposed to be where you basically just compared numbers to decide the winner. And the problem only got worse after HGSS, with most of Gen 5 being an equally stupid mess thanks to Reshiram and then Mewtwo EX. It was only with Gen 6 did we start to recover, and Gen 7 so far has been mostly better but still a far cry from what the game used to be.
You don't have to take my word for it either. Just skim through both sets:
https://pkmncards.com/?s=e%3Astormfront&display=scan&sort=numberhttps://pkmncards.com/?s=e%3Aheartgold-soulsilver&display=scan&sort=numberAnd realize both these packs came out less than a year apart and were in the same format.
