‘Brilliant Stars’ is February’s English Pokemon TCG Set!

[Yaginku]

People used to collect full sets in the WOTC days, no? That was definitely a thing. 'Catch 'em all' etc. during the height of it all.

Definitely the Base-Fossil and first 3 Neo sets. I wish I wasn't so lame as a kid, and collected the others which I deemed irrelevant as it was repeating Pokemon and had weird distinctions like -'s Pokemon and Dark and Light that weren't in the GB games.

Maybe it started with the massive e-series sets where both popularity was going down and then they shoehorned so many cards into a set.

But definitely in the SM and SWSH era it has been practically impossible to complete sets, and that's a good 5 years of behavioural modification.

It absolutely was, not just because there were less cards, but because these cards were usually worth squat, even the actually collectible ones. Just a few years ago a Base Set Charizard was a 100 bucks. The "anomaly" I mentioned about collecting whole sets was in relation to the fact that this rarely happened in other TCGs (primarily Magic, of course). Even today, set collectors are a fraction of the whole playerbase.
With S&M the price of cards started skyrocketting, even before today's bubble - partially that's due to Pokemon GO's massive boom, but primarily it was due to Secret Rares. And, again, as long as these are only collectible cards and not playable cards, there's nothing wrong with it. People want these cards because they're collectibles, so complaining about cards that are collectible while actually wanting them for your collection is just a waste of time, in my opinion.

 

[Subaroo]

This might seem a bit Farfetch'd, but the VSTAR cards' power seems to be in between V's and VMAX's. Just wanted to throw this out.