I want a general shift in game direction, focused on slowing down the pace of the game not by introducing more lock effects or similar counters, but through better card design in general. The biggest thing is Evolving Pokémon need to be more than filler. We don't need Evolution acceleration because that speeds the game's pace up even more or adds more of an investment to Evolutions. Evolving Basics should probably all function as "openers", Evolving Stage 1 cards should either be a solid spare attacker, have a useful Ability acting like a re-usable Item or Stadium (while the Stage 1 is in play) or Supporter (probably as a coming-into-play Ability). Then you don't need to rush the Stage 2 into play or making it insanely powerful; you've spread its usefulness throughout the entire line. Doesn't solve all problems, but it is an important part of it.
The other is working on pacing in general and in particular, attacks by Basic Pokémon. We need cards to know their role because unsurprisingly when you've got a big, Basic Pokémon that can be a solid early game, mid game and late game attacker, it does all of those and creates a major space savings in the deck... which makes it hard to balance out. Evolutions need time to get into play and are built and balanced against it (hence why Evolution acceleration isn't the solution): if a Basic is designed for early game attacking, it shouldn't be a good mid or late game attacker. If it is the deck's main, big hitter it needs to take some time/resources to set-up, giving Stage 1 and Stage 2 heavies time to do the same. Speaking of early attacking, nothing should be attacking for damage; I want my first turn attacks back because they were great for setting up and we can't do that until we stop having cards that can donk people. =P
These are badly needed but not likely so I'll add a simple, short one that works with or without them: HP scores need to go up. HP scores are so constrained especially compared to the source material (the video games). Of course humans with damage counters can't handle scores that range from one to over 700, but inflating HP scores without also bumping up damage output will slow the pace of the game and allow even the less hard hitting cards I described above to still prove useful while we wait for the current stuff to rotate out. The new stuff can't KO the old stuff quickly because it won't hit as hard as the old stuff does against the other old stuff and of course can't against each other, while the old stuff also won't be able to KO the new stuff quickly because it will just be that much bigger.
