bring back the Generation 3 meta
everything in Gen 3 was great. you had a coherent meta with a ton of different mechanics
- Owner's Pokemon
- Pokemon-ex (both basics and evolution)
- Dark Pokemon (always loved these)
- Holon Pokemon (OP engine, and helped balance out type variation in the meta)
- Pokemon Star (same as Shining Pokemon, and a better way of handling it than letting non-shiny cards evolve into/from shiny Pokemon)
All the sets had secret cards, but it was never overboard. Power creep wasn't too bad so a lot of older cards were still viable in unlimited, making it easy for anyone even vaguely interested to get back into it.
I played into late DP era, but Lv.X was shitty, the SP mechanic was a convoluted attempt at re-doing what should've been straight Owner's Pokemon, and we've never really seen any more fun with Dark Pokemon or Holon-type gimmicks.
In hindsight, Broken Space-Time was the card that signalled the end of the old ways, though BW seemed to have been the absolute point of no return.
