I read Jim Ferrell's recent article and all of it surprised me. Sure, I stopped playing the TCG for a while (thus, lack of my articles) but I never thought something like what he described, would happen.

First: The elimination of EVOLUTION??? Blastoise, Charizard and the like are now BASICS?? Excuse me, but just what have they been smoking? Half the fun and excitement of a battle is trying to get your basics and your evolution cards out to whoop on your opponent. But as basics?? Let's see, first turn, I get a Blastoise, you get a Scyther. Without having to go through Squirtle and Wartortle, the Scyther is essentially scrap. Sure, the Blastoise player would like that, but in my mind, that is some cheap stuff, a cheap way to win. We all wanna win, but don't we want to work for it? Don't we want a good match, one that involves lots of great moves by BOTH players, not just a one shot win?

Second: The reduction of the deck size. I assume that to mean that decks can only be 30 cards?? What kind of deck is that? If they wanted to reduce people abusing trainers and the like, they should have restricted those, not the whole deck. 60 cards was fair enough. Enough to have a good deck, but limited enough so as not to extend the game any further than it had to be. I can only imagine how many great decks were ruined by that rule. Mine all were.....