I am about to embark on an angry yet somewhat thoughtful rant. I want to comment on the elimination of the 15+ division and I will start with a little story.

One day in Washington, the Wizards of the Coast executives were having a conference. The CEO stood up and said:
"The Pokemon card game has become a fixture in American culture. It's made ours a familiar name to magazine writers. It's raked in millions of dollars of profit. Now, most of that profit came from the serious players ages 15 and older. I have a wonderful idea. Since we're all bored and stuff, I propose that we take all the profit that we could continue to make from this age group - tournament fees, qualifier fees, card profits - and see how far we can shove it up our asses. How about that?"
And that is how they came up with the idea to eliminate all you out there who are ages 15 and older from sanctioned tournaments.

Okay. So maybe they didn't really say to shove that profit up their asses. But the point stands: That's basically what they're doing! I'm afraid school life, maintaining a website, and that addiction some people call Gundam modeling have dampened my drive for tournament Pokemon play, but I'm one of those people who may not do something, but still likes the fact that they can - and Wizards plans to take that away from me? I think not!

These cretins need to know exactly how big the bullet is that they're going to fire into their foot! I'm willing to bet that most near 15+ are more willing to try and catch up to the metagame (no offense, but most "tweens" [I hate that word] don't have the drive - or the job!). In Magic, the metagame is so intense to keep up with, it's almost not worth it. There are practically a hundred cards in each set, which comes out every two months... By the time a guy finishes the Internet, magazine, and card-shop research he needs to compete, there's a hundred new cards to learn the nuances of. In Pokemon, the strategy in the game is deep, but the strategy in each card is not quite as deep as in Magic. In fact, the strategy comes out mostly when you play. You can't sit there and analyze a Pokemon card the way you can a Magic card. You play, and you find the combos.

In Magic, there are too many cards to try them in a game. To keep up with the metagame, you have to hope there are enough people who have analyzed cards and put it in print or pixels. In Pokemon, a simple sweep of a few places like Pojo.com's Card Strategies and a few games with new cards, and you're caught up and can modify your deck to compete.

Everybody says that Wizards doesn't give Pokemon any respect. That's wrong - they DISrespect it. They dropped CrossTrainer to make Neo Discovery. How damn hard is it to translate text? I find it highly suspicious that Wizards can prepare a Magic set in fifteen languages in two months, yet can't seem to translate a Pokemon set into four and then do another one without a gap. Unpaid fans translate Pokemon sets faster than paid Wizards employees do.
They dropped Mew from Fossil, saying that it was "special" and deserved "special treatment." It took two minutes in line at the Pokemon League to get the holographic one. Real special.
They released "Here Comes Team Rocket" as a non-holographic card. Can you say, "erases value?" They also threw the Ultra-Rare ranking out the window.
They changed the art on several cards because they came feet within being bad. A manji is not a swastika; Sabrina's middle finger is longer than her other fingers, just like everyone elses'... Although I didn't like the original art on Misty's Tears - she almost seemed to be smiling. o.o; ?
Wizards definitely wants you 15+ to play Magic. Can you count the number of large Magic ads you've seen in a magazine you've read? How about Pokemon? Somehow I get the impression that you don't read Nickelodeon magazine.

I'm not one to be silly and say I will sic a Pokemon on WotC. But I will say that, should they eliminate the 15+ age group from tournaments, as soon as I get my hands on a Minovsky reactor, Wizards' corporate officers should expect a house call from an RGM-79(G) GM Groundtype!

GM Groundtype
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