I'm sitting on 30 some Rare Candy I would hate to become worthless just because of a Breeder reprint. While I can appreciate unlimited play it can't factor in to these kind of decesions.
Except by that logic, shouldn't they avoid an early rotation? Wouldn't that be grounds for them to have not significantly altered the text for
Rare Candy in the first place?
I am wondering if you fully understood what I was saying. I am not saying to reprint Pokemon Breeder
now. I am saying that as soon as it was realized that the potency of
Rare Candy was the main hang-up for Trainers being allowed first turn, we needed
Rare Candy to quit showing up in so many sets. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps that is what they did do as
Unleashed isn't super recent. Plus, knowing you if this was coming down the pike in an obvious manner, you wouldn't be sitting on 30+
Rare Candy, would you? You might not have been able to reduce yourself down to the amount you'd have wanted for the occasional Unlimited foray, but again you've shown yourself to be a good trader and you'd probably be down to maybe one or two extra play sets, tops. Plus, you'd have made a killing snapping up older copies of
Pokemon Breeder in order to capitalize on the demand for it in my
theoretical scenario.:lol:
I always think the overall health of the game matters. If nerfing
Rare Candy was better for the game than reprinting
Pokemon Breeder and letting
Rare Candy rotate out, hey TPC made the right decision. I am not entirely convinced that having to issue such a significant errata was better than simply rotating it out, but neither am I certain my suggestion would be better. The effects of the secondary market are important, and more important to the game's health than Unlimited play. Neither trumps a healthy game itself, hence why something has to be done at all, even though the early rotation is probably messing up a lot of trader/sellers who were counting on the normal September 1st rotation and another two months to unload their old-but-not-yet-Unlimited-format-only stock.
There are people who play Unlimited, because they are semi-retired and only bust out their decks to play a friend periodically. Yeah, rules changes are a pain for them as well. Again, health of the current game comes first. I find it foolish to
completely dismiss this aspect of the game. As in if all things were revealed to be even for how to handle
Rare Candy, catering to Unlimited could tip the balance.
Unlimited has very low priority, but it is unwise to ignore it completely from a business standpoint.
Good luck with Finals.:thumb:
That's another problem as well. We never had basics that could hit for 120+ with no real recoil from the attack. It makes setup hard and if you use starters, You'll be giving off 2-4 prizes before you can even make a come back and by that time, the game is over.
What they did to Rare Candy was not fair. The game is way too fast and not being able to evolve as soon as you play a Pokemon with Rare Candy makes stage 2 decks unplayable and there are no Pokemon around that can evolve your Pokemon. I do like the next format a lot, but it's not looking good because there will be no deck variation.
Stop. Breathe. Think. I am sorry if that sounds condescending, but perhaps you'll forgive me because I've had this discussion so many times over the course of the Pokemon TCG, and many others.
When it comes to balancing a format for a TCG, you need to
- Identify the problem.
- Identify the exact cause of the problem.
- Create strategies (plural) to deal with the problem.
- Evaluate strategies to find the best one, avoiding creating future problems or returning to old ones.
- Implement the best strategy.
So with what you
fear will happen with the next format
- Big Basic Pokemon we have will cause the game to degenerate into what the format used to be like in the days when Unlimited was the Standard format.
- This rests on two record setting Basic Pokemon that just came out in the Western metagame, and in a format that does not yet officially exist there.
- Probable solutions would be to make Evolutions stronger, create balancing agents that will counter those two Basic Pokemon (or Basic Pokemon in general), after giving players time to come up with their own solutions.
- We can only half complete this step. If Rare Candy had not been altered, Evolution based donk decks would dominate. Cards like Donphan Prime would easily be able to donk players, and those decks they didn't donk they would still be hard to fight off a swarm of them. Thanks to Double Colorless Energy, many Stage 1 and 2 Pokemon would always be a come-from-nowhere threat. Basic Pokemon would exist only to Evolve and occasionally for a turn 1/2 set-up option. We have had multiple formats like this, so it is a pretty safe conclusion. We players need time to see if there are already solutions in the game and we just aren't using them. Fighting Weakness is pretty easy to exploit on Zekrom. Reshirom doesn't have donk potential to my knowledge. The fact that it needs Evolutions to power up fast gives most decks time to set themselves up before losing and indeed could be a weakness that can be exploited, especially if we get a Fossil Muk style Pokemon soon that shuts down Abilities. Even if we don't, the simplest solution wouldn't be to overpower Evolutions, but probably to ban the two problem Pokemon.