Building upon what baby_mario said, something odd that occurred at a Pokemon League I used to regularly attend was that when it came to Unlimited, Slowking was rarely used, but other anti-Trainer cards (Chaos Gym and Dark Vileplume) were widely played. There was something of a gentlemen's agreement between most of the players who
could build a real Mindgames focused deck (e.g. had more than 0 or 1 copies of the card) not to use it. Second one player (me
) was/is a huge Snorlax fan so I ran as good a Turbo Snorlax deck as I could design, and some of the other players would periodically try this.
So what does that mean here? Well in our micro-metagame Unlimited decks started making sure they weren't as Trainer heavy as normal, because it seemed like one in three games someone was locking down your Trainers...
and their own. So I wonder if that is the idea TPC is toying with... maybe we can have potent Trainer-Items
if we have several potent anti-Item cards. To the point where while not everyone (or almost everyone) feels they have to run the counter-Item cards (like Slowking and Trainers), a significant number of players will and that will achieve an odd balance.
Note, totally guessing there, and one moment I read it and it feels like I have something, the next even I think it sounds ridiculous. XD