People are saying DS Lite but realistically any of the 3DS family would be better at the moment for official ways to play the games.
The current GB/C/A emulators for Switch already support all the link capability of all 3 early gen games and it's very likely they'll be announced on Pokemon Day. At that point, the 3DS family could play every single other generation not on the Switch.
>>53270554If you are going for all physical releases, it doesn't hurt to have both a DS Lite and any of the 3DS/2DS family so you can migrate Pokemon upwards from gen 4 to 5 and 5 to Bank and up.
I'd honestly recommend against physical at this time because it costs a small fortune for authentic copies, let alone the time and effort you have to spend investigating if they're actually real copies is annoying. And even then, DS hardware is starting to go to junk with displays starting to decay similar to GBA SPs.
As someone that actually does collect but also has the knowledge and experience to restore and mod consoles, just go for emulation.
