Pokemon Brilliant Stars Has The Card Variety I've Always Wanted

thegamer.com:

Over the past five years, the Pokemon TCG has fallen into a predictable release schedule. Every fall since 2017, a special mini-set has been released, followed by regular expansions every three months after it. Ever since the release of Shining Fates last February, each expansion has broken from the traditional form in one way or another. Now a year later, Brilliant Stars is here to dramatically shake up the TCG by introducing a new card type, a special subset, and more chase cards than we’ve ever seen in a single expansion. To put things into perspective: there are five ultra-rare Charizards in this Brilliant Stars, and they aren’t even the most exciting thing about it.

There’s so much going on in Brilliant Stars that I don’t even know where to start. Despite officially falling under the Sword & Shield base set, Brilliant Stars feel like the start of a new generation. Not only does it have thematic ties to Legends: Arceus, but the energy cards sport a new background design - something you’d normally only see in a new base set. The new design is vaguely celestial, with a horizontal slash through the energy symbol that looks like the rings of Saturn and scatters of white dots that resemble stars in the sky. It’s a nice change from the Sword & Shield design we’ve had since early 2020 and a nice nod to Legends: Arceus.

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The big new mechanic here to shake up the meta is VSTAR, an alternate evolution line for V cards that emphasizes powerful abilities over the large health pools of VMAX cards. Each VSTAR card has a VSTAR Power - a powerful move or ability - and only one VSTAR Power can be used each game. VSTAR are functionally identical to GX cards,