Pokemon Catcher single-handedly kills off Stage 2 Pokemon... and is trying to steal your jobs!
C'mon people, if you're going to debate this try sticking to the facts and not exaggerating to the point of
proving yourself wrong. There is the slightest chance that
Pokemon Catcher will completely end Stage 2 decks. There is also the slightest chance that someone will drop a winning lottery ticket and I will find it. Realistically, the most probable outcome is that like in the early days of Unlimited, only the most powerful Stage 2 decks will remain... but they will still be Stage 2 decks.
A lot of people here are demonstrating a clear lack of understanding of how the Unlimited format has worked over the years. I'd like someone to tell me what Basic Pokemon can score six OHKOs in the first six turns
without a deck behind it. Zekrom? Without
Pachirisu and
Shaymin, what can it do on its own? Outrage first turn with a
Double Colorless Energy, and the damage that does is 20 plus whatever damage
Zekrom has already taken. Sure, they can spam
PlusPower and use
Pokemon Catcher to KO your smallest Pokemon but look at what we are requiring... its a deck!
What about Unlimited? In the early days of the game, what about then? We had
Professor Oak. No,
Professor Juniper is not
Professor Oak:
Oak was a Normal Trainer, basically an Item. Back then, so was
Bill. So instead of being forced to choose between a single
Professor Juniper and a "
Cheren", I could hypothetically drop between four and eight "Item"
Professor Juniper in a single turn, then drop between four and eight "
Cheren-minus-one" Items as well. The "four-to-eight" refers to how many
Item Finder I chose to use up on re-using those two. We also had a
Twins that may have required discarding two cards from hand to use and only got one card, but it was an Item and didn't require you be behind in Prizes. That's be
Computer Search. Oh, and this being before Trainers got sub-types, it also means that
Item Finder was like a
Junk Arm that worked on any Trainer. Let all that sink in...
...now start adding cards we don't see used much because the closest equivalents have been nerfed.
Energy Removal and
Super Energy Removal. You don't need OHKOs when your opponent has to resort to single Energy attacks or successfully Evolve into
Blastoise from a 40 HP
Squirtle. In the modern format we have a choice between an Item that only works on Special Energy (though it does remove them from play) and an Item that requires a coin toss to remove an Energy.
Lastly,
Stage 2 Pokemon are just better made now. True, most Pokemon are better now, but basically Unlimited was the handful of well designed Pokemon for their format duking it out... and I mean handful. When we go Base Set, you got two core deck types that worked well enough to be truly competitive. Not just BDIF but
competitive. You went from "Can win tournaments" to "Only for fun". There was no middle ground. Well, small card pool, right?
Jungle added two more decks... or did it?
Clefable and
Wigglytuff needed "partners" to really work. Basically, the Haymaker "graduated" to a beatdown deck. While we got a few more playable cards than just those two, it wasn't much. Really just
Scyther, and that reinforced Haymaker and Beatdown decks.
Fossil finally gave us some new core type decks. We now had Rain Dance Beatdown, Toxic Gas Beatdown, Only Basics Beatdown, and Stage 1 beatdown. Three sets. Three viable Stage 1 Pokemon. One viable Stage 2 Pokemon. Even only five or six viable Basic Pokemon!
tl;dr: This isn't Unlimited at any point in its history. Hyperbole is just confusing the issue because the exaggerations being used aren't taking fundamental points to their logical extent.
