>>53153861No one gives a fuck about this kind of prescriptivism. "Actually, Pokemon cards can't be vintage, because vintage means 'over 40 years old'" or "well, technically, the term vintage comes from the latin term 'vinum' meaning 'wine'..." No one cares dude. Words get their meaning from how they're used.
At the moment, there's a kind of consensus (and I don't know how firm that consensus actually is, but it seems commonplace) that WotC cards are, you know, "true vintage." And I think this is the case because it's easy to periodize. It's when publishing changed hands, it coincides with a significant formatting change and a new generation, and yeah, it comes at a time when "Pokemania" was dying down. There's also a marked shift in the series' visual style (look at the difference in the stock Sugimori art between gens 2 and 3). It's hard to explain, especially to people who weren't around at the time, but there's a strong affective change in the franchise after the second generation -- gen 3 is kind of where the "modern," sleeker Pokemon franchise began.
I think all that is why people say WotC is the cutoff for "vintage." Is it totally arbitrary and subject to change? Yeah, sure. But at the moment, that just descriptively seems to be how a lot of people conceive it.
