A bit more digging made me realize that there was a whole concept of Parallel city in some of the expansions, namely Blue Shock and Red Flash. The concept was to show a contrast between the two cities.
In the future expansions, this parallel city also started “leaking” into each other, startling some of the Pokemon and even allowing Pokemon to cross through.
That’s really neat! I hadn’t noticed the theme contrasting the urban city and the more natural town. It’s pretty cool to show this contrast with the same Pokemon and their different lives in the two areas.
Skyridge and Aquapolis are probably the most cohesive to their name - lost of cityscape and mountain settings. I also really like the large amount of snow and autumn colors in Great Encounters and Majestic Dawn. The white snow gives a great contrast to the pokemon and artists made some fun interactions with it. The golden leaves are just one of my favorite things.
Without dropping too many images, I’ve always come back to my favorite set: EX Legend Maker. This set fused what Jungle and Fossil were to me back when I was a kid - filled with real-world habitats where we’d expect Pokémon to reside with a sense of mystery and wonder. (And a little bit of spookiness with the Ghost-types in the mix.) I always thought Legend Maker was more of a snapshot from the past (when the Fossil Pokémon were still alive and roaming) and featured Pokémon in a deep and lush jungle on an island secluded from the rest of the world. Where else would Mew and the Regis live?
The EX Legend Maker Prerelease was also the first officially sanctioned event I attended and where I pulled my first Gold Star - Regirock. I love this set and am almost finished with the master and Chinese master set (anyone got the Gold Star Regis at a reasonable price?) and I’ll make thirteen-year-old me proud when I’m done with them. This set is awesome.
Probably the Japanese exclusive VS series, a continuation of the 2 Gym sets @pfm loves so much. the best part of this set is that all artworks are drawn from the perspective/imagination of the Gym leader/Elite four/Champion member in question.
and each of these Pokémon trainers were assigned 1 artist for the job making this incredibly unique.
who doesn’t enjoy collecting TM’s which unironically end up being the rarest cards in the set.
Kagemaru Himeno, Mitsuhiro Arita, Ken Sugimori, and the late, great Keji Kinebuchi managed to design and create a set that feels lush, wild, exotic and endlessly memorable with only 47 out of the 151 Pokémon available at the time… JUNGLE
