In the defense of Pidgeot, it mad many decks playable, no matter what the deck was.
Playable or
functional? The two are not the same thing. My experience was that
Pidgeot made the
best decks either dominant (extreme end of "playable") or dominant and functional... where functional just means that the deck accomplishes its goals other than actually securing a win. Basically, that amounts to setting up and accomplishing any key tactics, whether or not those end up winning you the game or not.
Some top decks wouldn't have worked without
Pidgeot, some would. Still,
most decks ended up remaining sub-par even if
Pidgeot helped them, plus some decks that
would have been good were hurt by
Pidgeot. Yes, hurt: decks that excel at quickly taking down opponents
but at a reasonable cost to itself were really hurt.
Decks like one of my favorites (translation: this is my personal bias), Liability. Still, many decks suffered as
Pidgeot enabled rapid-fire recovers for all decks... meaning the top decks just remained the top decks. Coming up with a clever rogue deck or play meant nothing because the next turn a Quick Search and a Supporter usage and your opponent had their next attacker ready to go!
There were also many counters to turn it off. You had Battle Frontier to turn off the power and Giant Stump to force a opponent to discard it.
There are counters and there are
successful counters.
Battle Frontier did wonders against the new wave of
Dark and
Rocket's decks, but it wasn't all that effective a counter for
Pidgeot;
Pidgeot decks just
ran a different Stadium. As long as they could draw (or spare a preparatory Quick Search for) a Stadium, Quick Search was back!
That means Battle Frontier could completely fail to counter Pidgeot!
About
Giant Stump: yes its effect forced players down to just three Pokémon on your Bench but realistically, the only time you'd give up your
Pidgeot was when you already had a strong set-up. The majority of the time it would make more sense to keep
Pidgeot and rebuild your Bench... and that assumes you needed more than three Pokémon on your Bench.
Both were released
after Pidgeot:
Battle Frontier debuted three whole sets later...
Giant Stump six full sets!
Pidgeot was good but not too good. Everyone played it so they both had the option and Pidgeot made the format skill based and not luck based.
To give a good impression of the format, players need to be aware that this was a time with draw power like
Steven's Advice (
EX: Hidden Legends 92/101,
EX: Power Keepers 83/108). It was a time of
Rare Candy working on a Pokémon you just Benched and could thus accelerate Basic to Stage 1 or Stage 2! It was a time of
Boost Energy (most recent printing
OP Series 5 8/17),
Double Rainbow Energy (most recent printing
OP Series 5 4/17), and
Scramble Energy (most recent printing
EX: Dragon Frontiers 89/101). Being able to snag such cards so easily, even if only once per turn, was plenty.
So I must completely disagree with
vaporeon's assessment.
Pidgeot was too good. Everyone
always has the option to run
every and any card, unless it is literally so scarce there aren't enough copies. Even taking into account pricing issues, this logic
fails. Not every deck will have room for every card, so some decisions must be made.
Pidgeot was what is often referred to as a "loose" staple. A staple is a card every deck runs, however very few cards are "true" staples that virtually every deck either runs or runs maxed out. A "loose" staple can either be a card most decks run but a few don't, or as I am using it in this case, a card that is either
run or
countered in the vast majority of decks. If you're wondering, since I mean every deck when I say every deck, there will be exceptions: those who can't afford it or stubbornly insist on not running it.
There was an alternative to
Pidgeot, and that was
Magcargo (
EX: Deoxys 20/107), but I never saw it successfully used without also including
Battle Frontier (
EX: Emerald 75/106,
EX: Power Keepers 71/108). It also was much less prominent than
Pidgeot. I likely have missed at least some successful decks that ran only one, the other, maybe even neither, but usually the few decks not running
Pidgeot had
Magcargo with
Battle Frontier.
I do not mean to dismiss anyone's skill, but it was a different skill set; a significant aspect of general playing skill was rendered largely unimportant because player's could easily access any one card from the deck a turn, and this in turn increased reliance of a specific section of deck building skill. Skill is still skill, but it really was not fun with how it overpowered certain decks while just giving a slight boost to others, and even less fun when you were given the choice of running something you might enjoy or sticking with the archetypes and staples.
If you want to talk about powerful, then Cyrus's Conspiracy where only one type of deck could use it. We need more cards that work for everything. It would be nice to have a Dark Patch for all energy types.
vaporeon, we've been over this before and you haven't refuted the logic; it isn't being
exclusive that automatically "breaks" a card. This is not to say I would consider
Cyrus's Conspiracyby any means balanced, just that making it work for all decks just means all decks pretty much have to run it, and all get to be "overpowered".
Think of it like this: back in the day,
all decks could choose to run
Energy Removal and
Super Energy Removal, but
some decks could run them
better and
some decks were
less vulnerable to them. The net result was (exact numbers varying based on the time period) a few decks being at the top, a few more being second string, and seemingly everything else a distant third; so distant that truly hopeless or joke decks weren't worth separating out to fourth place.
