To start off, I like the game play of Poke'mon. The only problem is everytime a new set comes out, it seems they change the rules to the start of the game.
That is an exaggeration, though the basic rules are often changed. I do not necessarily consider this to be a bad thing: far too many games will keep flawed rules for years when the slightest change would fix things. Balancing the power of going first versus going second is quite challenging, especially with an evolving game.
We need to ultimately and permanently decide if we can play goods/item cards during the first turn or not. Same with drawing first. Thats a small change that we need consenses.
A consensus doesn't really apply here. The rules are that you can do both first turn. Could they change? That is always a possibility, but realistically I would think such a change would not be instituted until the usual time, namely the next block of sets.
Another thing that can be improved on is the way the format is conducted. I have played in all three of the BIG Three (Magic, Poke'mon, Yu-gi-oh!) and have seen among them two different ways to conduct a format: Set Rotation and Ban List formats.
You do realize the inherent differences in those game systems, right? Magic is carefully structured to maintain even a semblance of balance. I was just about to start dabbling with Limited events for Magic, but my finances went kaput and then I moved, so it just isn't happening. Still what I do recall is that very few cards lacked a mana cost to play, it was a pretty clear divide on cards whose mana cost were tailored for multi-color decks and what pretty much required a mono-color deck to reasonably run, and most importantly draw power was no where near what it is in Pokemon.
Yu-Gi-Oh I started playing with the American release of the Yu-Gi-Oh and Kaiba Starter decks, the genesis of the American game. I excelled at the game for a short time, started struggling after a few sets, then made a triumphant return after a few more sets, started struggling again, and for several years just dabbled and wrote Card of the Day reviews. I finally decided I could keep up on Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh, and Pokemon was more fun. Seeing the most recent changes to Yu-Gi-Oh, the only real way to improve that game is to kill it with fire. -_- I love the basic concepts that underlie Yu-Gi-Oh game play, but the cards are not designed to be balanced within the system.
To clarify, notice the huge difference between Magic (or Pokemon) and Yu-Gi-Oh: the resource card. Magic has mana, Pokemon has Energy, but Yu-Gi-Oh has no equivalent. This means that even before factoring in minimum deck size, draw power in Yu-Gi-Oh is "extra potent": there is no once-per-turn resource card cluttering things up.
I will not be quoting your exact words for the next few points, because I can merely respond in general and nothing needs to be emphasized. You are not the only person with several older cards. Any long time player that either didn't care to abandon his older cards or wasn't smart enough to has quite a collection built up after even a few years. Now reflect upon what I just said: if you have a build up of cards you can't play, that means either at one time you wanted to keep them (I fall into that category), or you don't failed to sell/trade them off when you could. Set Rotation is not like Yu-Gi-Oh Ban List rotation. In Yu-Gi-Oh, the only real heads up is what happens on the Japanese Ban List, which (at least when I played) would update a month or so before the international one.
Pokemon isn't like that. You know its coming and you have a solid idea of what is going to go. No one knows with 100% certainty but the general rule of thumb is four or so sets will go. Smart players will always anticipate the rotation and unload anything they don't want to keep. Under normal circumstances, your best stuff for the current format can easily be sold off to someone headed to Worlds? Why? Because no one wants to be disqualified if their deck is stolen, and some one always seems to pull that garbage at Worlds. So between wanting to have as many decks as possible to choose from in case they sense a sudden metagame shift and wanting to have back-ups of at least all important cards (and usually whatever their most likely deck is going to be), the World-bound player has a strong incentive to buy up a lot of cards on the secondary market before worlds. The most savvy will even recoup this investment by simply being willing to sell to other players: there isn't a worry about helping someone beat you since if you don't sell to them, you know someone else will.
This year was a bit odd as we had an early rotation, but you know what the powers that be did? They announced they were contemplating it about two months before the fact, then confirmed they were going to do it one month before the fact: plenty of time to unload those extra cards.
Actually building up a playable card pool is quite easy and affordable in this game
unless you rush things. No you can't get a top deck fast and cheap, but you can usually cobble together something fun for League play and build steadily by going to Pre-Releases and trading smart. Pre-Releases really are a gold mine just because collectors often want to finish the collection ASAP, and many players will want their full play set
now! So sorry friend, you have no one to blame but yourself if you lack the cards needed to play.
As for getting your money's worth... how much did you spend on non-secondary market cards and how long have you been using them? Pokemon cards usually aren't that expensive, especially when you're just buying them in packs. The most rare cards in Pokemon tend to be more common than the most rare in Yu-Gi-Oh, and less expensive on the secondary market as well. Either way, your mistake is thinking you're buying "Organized Play For Life!" You're buying card board with art and rules text printed on it, to play a children's card game they were designed for. Plenty of companies make good money just dumping TCGs onto the market with no Organized Play. Organized Play is basically a giant piece of Customer Service used to promote the game... but
it doesn't have to be.
You really want to keep using your old stuff? Start setting up tournaments with older formats and cash prizes. Even something small should entice solid local players to come.
Now finally getting to the idea of a Ban List... Ban Lists are a tool of
last resort. Second your headings show you fall to what I consider the common misconceptions of Yu-Gi-Oh. Think of broken cards like mountains in a mountain range. Some are bigger than others, but all are still mountains, just as some cards are more broken than others, but still broken. Two kinds of broken cards tend to obscure the rest, just as mountains can obscure other mountains. You have the mountain that is
right in front of you. So while there are mountains behind it, you might not be able to see them. Then are are the mountains
that are huge: up close or far away other smaller mountains may be hidden by them, or the shadow they cast.
Yu-Gi-Oh has so many broken cards it hurts my head. Many players will claim a card isn't broken because there is something else more powerful available and/or the broken card isn't being played. If we simply take things to extremes, we can see that just because something isn't played doesn't mean it is "balanced". Let us create a hypothetical card called "Screw the Rules!" that is a Normal Spell that simply states "You win." Completely and utterly broken. Now let us create a card called Brooklyn Rage that is also a Normal Spell and does 8000 points of damage. Both are broken, but clearly the first is "more broken" since the latter could be foiled by more counter-cards. Still in either case you get a ridiculous amount of advantage for little investment.
Now guess what? Let's continue our thought experiment by supposing Konami needed a lot of filler cards, and people loved these two but at the same time complained they were broken, so they keep nerfing them... slightly. So we get Trap versions of the above. Monster versions of the above. Then just slightly weaker versions of all the preceding, such as a Normal Spell that inflicts 7000 points of damage, one that does 6000, etc. A year later, they need more filler cards and start adding costs like "Pay 1000 LP then do 8000 points of damage to your opponent" in all the varieties, and then tweaking the costs and final damage outputs. We will easily have more than enough of these cards to create a 40 card deck, and still have cards left over that would never see play.
All that was pretty ridiculous, but now dial it back and you see how this actually has happened in the real game: we may have a variety of effects, but formats always seem to have more unbalanced (broken) cards than are needed to fill a full deck.
It doesn't help that Konami doesn't address the fundamental values of Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Monsters are the hardest cards to get into play (based on the fundamental rules) and so should be the most powerful cards. Konami ignores this by constantly making monsters with Special Summon requirements, and the ones that see play have the least hampering costs to Special Summon. So an effect that would be fine on a Level 8 Monster that required two monsters of tribute to normal summon becomes broken when that monster has a negligible Special Summon requirement, or when the game provides an easy source of monsters you can special Summon to provide the required Tribute.
Spells are the easiest to play cards, so they should have the weakest effects. Instead they have the strongest, and the only thing that challenges them are monsters that basically act like Spells with a body attached to them. Think about
Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning: if you took his removal effect and summoning cost and made them a normal Spell, at least while I played that Spell would have become a staple maxed out. Instead the actual card gets that same effect and Spell Speed, but includes a 3000 ATK Light Warrior with another good attack and solid DEF score (I can't remember that number off the top of my head). >_<
Traps are the middle card: easier to play than monsters but harder to play than Spells. If you could constantly reload your hand you could set five Traps on your turn, then use those five by Main Phase 2 of your next turn and set five more. So they should have effects somewhere in the middle.
Lastly, with this hierarchy it should be evident that Spells (being so easy to play) should have a hard time destroying anything except perhaps other Spells. Traps could relatively safely destroy Spells and perhaps each other. Neither should be able to directly destroy a monster without a significant cost or targeting restriction. Monsters should be safe destroying anything, so long as the difficulty of summoning the monster is taken into account.
Instead for the periods of the game I was familiar with, the relationship was the complete opposite, except when we had monsters that were, as stated, effectively Spells with a body attached to them. Oh, or the fact that Konami must really hate Traps as they make them far to easy to negate (Jinzo, Royal Decree).
So getting back to your categories, I'd argue that all three are simply broken cards, with the exact level of brokenness varying. There is a possible argument for using Bans because the player base just
refuses to play anything but a specific deck or small set of decks. I have often speculated that certain unbalanced Pokemon formats owed more to the designers having decks A, B, and C and expecting equal play between the three. Balance would be achieved because of a cycle of favorable match-ups: A>B, B>C, but C>A. Unfortunately Deck B is build around a really popular Pokemon, so instead of roughly a third of the players using it, 90% play it. The remaining 10% try to make it with Deck A. No one bothers with Deck C because it has such poor match-ups against 90% of the matches expected. You'd might think that deck A would then be tops but the thing is, 9 out of 10 decks might be favorable matches, but they aren't auto-wins. Even if the best player is running deck A, he might be facing eight rounds before top cut of losing due to his bad luck, his opponent's good luck, or simply his one mistake of the tournament.
What about your desire for a side deck? This is another time when you must understand the difference between Pokemon and Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh. In Yu-Gi-Oh, the side deck is actually kind of broken. Do you not see how much innovation is ruined with side boards in a game like Yu-Gi-Oh where most cards can be run in any deck? There were many decks that were fun and functional but crippled because if anyone tried running them, there was an easy counter-card someone would side deck in. There are also brutal decks that dominated that I think remained overpowered because all the obvious cards Konami could have designed and released to counter it... would have been side deck bait and instead of balancing things out, would have rendered the former broken deck worthless to play.
Pokemon may have a resource system Yu-Gi-Oh usually lacks, but
Pokemon is structured so that counter cards are to be run in the main deck. You can have 60 cards, the game has ample search, draw, and recycling cards,
and only Pokemon tend to have specific resource requirements (and even then there are many intentionally designed to be run off type).
Try thinking about it this way: 15 cards is enough for many Pokemon decks completely convert into a different deck. A completely unrelated deck? No. But even ignoring some of the most broken examples it'd be easy to essentially run two different of any mono or two-type deck. 15 slots lets you replace a 3-3-3 Stage 2 line and a 3-3 Stage 1. Then if you have any good Pokemon (which the current format has many) that are capable of appearing in multiple top decks and have minimal energy requirements, and its possible to have three decks in one.
The other kicker is that if you only allow a small side board, it has to be very small to prevent abuse, at which point you have to explain why you aren't good enough to fit the cards into your main deck. If you insist on championing a side deck for Pokemon, realize that it probably has to be between six and nine cards: anymore and its too powerful, any less and its just a player's lack of skill at being unable to work it into the main deck.
Match play doesn't happen because of time and money. If you want best two of three to actually matter, you have to extend round times, and that means a longer tournament with more costs to it, and possible problems as younger players can barely handle a five to eight hour event. The biggest tournaments would take twice as long. Cool as a week long World Championship sounds, it isn't happening. Ness started a thread recently about altering the tournament structure and I suggest you look it up. The title is Restoring Skill To the Game, or something like that.
Unfortunately to answer a gargantuan post required a gargantuan post, so I am sorry if this is cluttered, a bit jumbled, or perhaps has a few points that drop off. Feel free to ask questions and I will explain more.
Oh, and seriously: Mulligan's Mewtwo was either a joke or a goof on the part of InQuest. They completely ignored that a single Energy removal, Special Condition, etc. costs it the game.
