What format is OP refering to?
Pre-Neo Genesis.
Anyway, your deck lists are far better than what is currently on Bulbapedia; no offense intended to Bulbapedia, and to answer the obvious question, editing those pages is a pain; besides formatting, the few edits I've tried to make I recall being quickly reversed with a polite "No".
For a Base Set only Rain Dance deck, it would have featured
Dewgong and Gyarados. Trainer count is high (this deck had to have a lot of Pokémon and Energy); like modern Deluge decks a lot of the good "tricks" just had to be skipped. In its favor though it usually ran
Pokémon Center.
Gyarados wasn't :lightning: Weak and it was :fighting: Resistant, and
Energy Removal really wasn't that great against a
good Haymaker build, though it still might have been run for other decks; I favored
Super Energy Removal myself, but it isn't like I was winning tournaments with it or anything.
Haymaker would consider running a third Basic;
Machop was actually used as a weaker
Hitmonchan and back up so you didn't mulligan so much. If you were okay with flips,
Farfetch'd was also used. Quite a few others were tried, but I don't know how well they actually worked.
My knowledge of how these lists changed with the addition of
Gym Heroes and
Gym Challenge is pretty sketchy. I can tell you that once
Fossil hit, Rain Dance ran
Fossil Articuno and
Lapras, though you may already have known that given you were focusing on
Base Set only.
---------- Post added 04/14/2013 at 05:00 PM ----------
No one mentioned Clefable/Muk?
Was Magnemite w/Defender any sort of deck? I remember playing against that at league.
Wasn't there some kind of turbo Snorlax?
My experience is that
Clefable was overhyped; most of your opponents were Haymaker and that means you weren't outpacing them by much with Metronome, and the only
Clefairy available had just 40 HP and :fighting: Weakness.
Wigglytuff was a definite
Muk partner;
Scyther was easy to run alongside it (helping with
Hitmonchan),
Jigglypuff had 60 HP (just a bit harder to OHKO), and
Muk shuts down Rain Dance decks. I tried both
Wigglytuff and
Clefable used together with
Muk, with "okay" results: nothing conclusive.
I loved blowing my Pokémon up (I am a terrible, terrible person), so I did try Self-Destruct decks. S/ER pretty much ruins them; only
Magnemite blows up for two Energy. When I play-tested without S/ER in the format,
Weezing actually was pretty solid.
I should probably list my favorite deck of all time, since you brought it up. Unfortunately besides the fact that I didn't learn about it until the middle of the Neo Block (at the earliest), I had a hard drive crash a while ago that wiped out all of my old decks.
Twice.
I never was very good about back-ups. So from memory/adjusting for the different card pool and thus probably not a "good" list:
Pokémon x 18
3 Dark Gloom
3 Dark Vileplume
4 Oddish
4 Scyther4 Snorlax
Trainers x 30
4 Bill
4 Computer Search
2 Energy Removal
4 Erika
2 Gust of Wind
2 Imposter Oak's Revenge
1 Item Finder
1 Nightly Garbage Run
2 Pokémon Breeder
4 Professor Oak
2 Switch
2 Trash Exchange
Energy x 12
4 Double Colorless Energy
8 Grass Energy
The earliest list I saw also included
Drowzee (
Team Rocket 54/82). I tried it; it was only slightly useful for additional stall first turn, and ate up precious Bench space.
Psyduck (
Fossil 53/62) makes sense if you want to use
Psychic Energy or
Rainbow Energy cards, as it can open and block opponent's Trainers. Of course, that all means cutting other cards and still might require more room.
As presented, you're going to have to take your lumps first/second turn. You should be Evolving ASAP into
Dark Vileplume, but you do
not want to ignore
Dark Gloom; you want
both. This is because the deck shuts down Trainers (a-duh) and this was
before they nerfed Confusion. In the old days, a Pokémon did 20 points of damage to itself (bad for you if they were self-Resistant, good for you if they were self-Weak) but most importantly, your opponent had to flip to successfully retreat out of it!
Thick Skin protects
Snorlax from failed uses of Pollen Stench. It is Psychic Resistant (hampering Movie Promo
Mewtwo), and while 30 damage for
colorless::colorless::colorless::colorless
wasn't good even back then, that 50 % chance of Paralysis was important because you were stacking that on top of Pollen Stench. Yes, I know Paralysis replaces Confusion; I mean you are stacking attempts and disrupting your opponent. With no Trainers and either being unable to Retreat at all or with only a 50% success rate, odds were in your favor of taking very little damage.
Obviously, Fighting-Types were a problem; enter good ol'
Scyther. You could even risk using Pollen Stench if you were daring and had a second
Scyther on the Bench. If you failed your Retreat attempt, you were out of luck. However, if you succeeded, the old Retreat rules only restricted you to one attempt at retreating a Confused Pokémon; otherwise you had Unlimited "Retreats" during a turn. With two
Scyther, you could attempt to retreat to the second, and if it worked, easily retreat back to the original to keep up the attack.
If things went very, very well you could even risk promoting
Dark Vileplume and
trying to Confuse it yourself. Doing so would restore access to Trainers... which is why the deck includes tricks to keep it from every running out (
Nightly Garbage Run,
Trash Exchange, and
Item Finder) as well as two
Energy Removal and two
Gust of Wind, just to mess with your opponent. Follow up with a
Switch to your actual attacker to re-instate the lock. Also, I really wanted a second
Nightly Garbage Run and I always ran it as 2-2 with
Trash Exchange; not sure what I would cut for it.
Erika/
Imposter Oak's Revenge was a common combo after being released. It was a "better
Bill", and once you'd ripped through your own deck, you used
Imposter Oak's Revenge to drop your opponent down to a four card hand. There is a definite danger with my build of not having enough deck left for the lock to matter, but I don't know if there is any other recourse. By the time I was using it, I had access to
Cleffa (
Neo Genesis 20/111) and
Tyrogue (
Neo Discovery 66/75), and shortly afterwards
Professor Oak's Research (so I didn't have to always trash my hand first turn) plus
Warp Energy (
Aquapolis 147/147).
