Back when I started working at an FLGS, one of my responsibilities was the Pokémon TCG League. Whilst I've never been too big on Collectable Card Games, I used to have a bit of fun with Pokémon, mostly because the community was a lot of fun and the game had enough depth to be engaging. Like most card games, Pokémon has a rotation, meaning cards are only usable in tournaments and events like League for a couple of years before being replaced by the new ones. In a lot of ways, this approach is advantageous to players, because new cards are easy to find and you avoid the Yu-Gi-Oh issue of cards becoming impossible to get a hold of. The flipside is, of course, players end up with a lot of useless cards on their hands. Back when I was doing this (2010 to 2013ish), aside from the Standard game, there wasn't another way to play Pokémon and use the older cards in the League. Expanded Format was around, but no one really bothered and Unlimited was yet to be birthed officially, but there were some older cards I wanted to get on the table, so I had to have a bit of a think.
Magic The Gathering already had some other formats going at the time, some of which had started with groups of players putting them together independently, like "Commander", originally called EDH (Elder Dragon Highlander), which put interesting restrictions on deckbuilding, but allowed for a greater depth of cards from older sets. To this end, I set about making a variant of the Pokémon TCG with my friends, both so we could keep using some of the cards we have, but we also wanted to capture more of the "feel" of the video games. We called the resulting format "Pokémon Trainer Battles", and it had a number of issues, but I think it wasn't too bad overall. I think if the idea of something other than Standard had been on the tables, we could have developed it more, but lack of interest made us drop the idea before it went too far. Knowing what I know now, I suspect that we would have had to start banning some cards, but any extended-format card game has that issue.
First off, Trainer Battles was different in that a "deck" only contained 6 Pokémon and they all started on the field, face down, to better simulate the six Pokeballs carried by trainers in the video games. One was still in the "Active" space, and was revealed after turn order had been decided, but the remaining five on the bench would be hidden at the start. Unlike the normal game, these Pokémon could be at any Stage, not just basics, again in an attempt to simulate the video games. As the Pokémon on the bench were KOed or Switched, they would be flipped up, so your opponent would slowly learn what you had and vice-versa. Pokémon on the Bench could only be damaged by attacks when face up and could only use Abilities when face up, for an added element of risk. So if I was running something like the Serperior with the "Royal Heal" ability, I would have to expose it to risk to gain the benefit it provides.
The rest of the "deck" that players had also featured a few restrictions; 40 cards rather than 60, and, excepting Basic Energy, in "singleton" format, i.e., one of each card. Unlike in regular games, "decking out" didn't trigger a game loss, as the intention was to emulate "PP" from the video games, but this may have been a mistake, as one player just built an engine to draw his entire deck as fast as possible, due to the lack of a "max hand size" rule in the Pokémon TCG. Me, I focused on recurring my Boost Energy card to drop huge attacks each turn. Energy and Items could still be attached to face-down Pokémon, but players had to declare it, as in "I am attaching a Water Energy to this Pokémon", but we did experiment with options for "hidden" attachment. Of course, some cards, like Rare Candy and Devolution Spray were essentially unplayable in Trainer Battles, but this was to be expected, and cards like Computer Search and Red Card became a lot more interesting.
So was Trainer Battles a "failure"? Yes and no. We abandoned it because it didn't catch on, but we also really didn't put enough effort into it either. Thinking about this all these years later, I can see some fun that could be had with the format and, if I still had any physical cards, might put together a couple of decks to test out. Some cards would certainly need to be banned (anything that returned Active Pokémon to hand for example), but the opportunities to try out new combinations and give old cards new life would be good to see in the Pokémon TCG, which doesn't have all that much variation currently. The only format of Magic The Gathering I play is Commander, precisely because I don't need more than one or two new cards with each new set and even an entire new deck can be pretty affordable, so something more like that for Pokémon would be very much of interest to me. Feedback welcome on this one, folks.
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