If the Team Rocket set was a well-meaning set with a few bad apples, then the Gym series was the poison those bad apples were laced with. While the vast majority of the cards danced around between playable and unplayable, a handful of powerful cards all but ruined the metagame in the last few sets of the first generation.
I hope you liked the hand-ripping and non-interactive gameplay that was introduced in Team Rocket, because this is where they dialed it up to eleven and decided that every game should be decided by a coin flip. I'm exaggerating slightly, but only slightly.
The Troublemakers
The Rocket's Trap completed one of the most degenerate combos ever printed. First, you use Imposter Oak's Revenge to reduce your opponent's starting hand size to 4. Then you use Rocket's Sneak Attack to snipe the best Trainer Card out of their hand.
Finally, you play The Rocket's Trap. If you flip heads, your opponent is starting the game with zero cards in hand. Even if you flip tails, you can always just dig through your deck in search of another copy.
It's worth discarding a chunk of your deck if you have to, because being hit by the full combo is practically impossible to come back from unless you hard draw into a Professor Oak.
This is THE combo that defined the format.
If you prefer a different flavor of degeneracy, then there's always Erika's Jigglypuff. It can do 40 damage on the first turn with a single Double Colorless Energy, keeping in mind that most evolving basics only had 40-50 HP at the time.
With a few Pluspowers, this card could knock out just about anything your opponent could possibly have in the active spot. And if that was the only basic they drew? Tough luck. Instant loss.
Since players loved being locked down by Dark Vileplume so much, we obviously needed another oppressive way to counter Trainer Cards, right? Chaos Gym doesn't just stop the card from activating, though. They flip a coin to see whose card it even is.
If they get heads the card plays as normal. No loss. Your gym is still in play. Better luck next time. But if they flip tails? Well now you get to use the effect of their Professor Oak or Gust of Wind or Super Energy Removal or whatever.
The effect is symmetrical, but all that means is that whoever goes first empties out the opponent's hand, donks their starter with Erika's Jigglypuff, and then slaps down a Chaos Gym to prevent any attempts at a miraculous recovery. Clearly fair and balanced.
New Names, Same Old Pokémon
Not all of the cards from these sets were degenerate nonsense. Rocket's Zapdos is certainly a good card, but was really just "good." It usurped the throne of Electabuzz as the new big basic for lightning decks, and was another attacker that didn't care about Energy Removal.
It also paired nicely with cards like Computer Search and Professor Oak. If you were going to be discarding cards constantly anyway, there might as well be something in your deck that can snatch up some of the discarded energy and use it, right?
Erika's Dratini was the counterpoint to Rocket's Zapdos, and is actually a very cleverly designed card. Since big basics were still very much the meta, Strange Barrier allowed you to survive their best attacks for a few turns by reducing all damage done to Erika's Dratini down to 10.
It also doesn't punish evolution decks in any way, which is a fantastic design space to be in during this time. They were struggling enough as-is, after all.
Perhaps the best thing about this card was that it could buy you a few turns if your hand got ripped out from under you. Cards like this and Kangaskhan quickly became definitive "survival mode" cards. It represents a nice halfway point between Jungle Mr. Mime's oppressive stall strategies and Neo Genesis Cleffa's role as a hand extender.
Misty's Wrath promises pure unbridled aggression. Choose any two cards from your top seven, then discard the other five.
Only the most cutthroat quick-kill strategies were willing to touch this card at the time, but as it so happens those just happened to be some of the most dominant strategies in Base-Gym.
Misty's Wrath paired nicely with the trapper combo and Erika's Jigglypuff, slotting right into the "first turn decides the match" playstyle.
There were also such a wide variety of 'mons with such unique effects that you were bound to end up finding something you liked. Several of them didn't actually see play until finding a place for themselves later on, like how Erika's Victreebel became much more relevant once powerful 'mons that were weak to grass entered the format.
Others, like Brock's Ninetales, found homes for themselves right away. There were also more attempts to curb the impact of Energy Removal, with Brock's Protection and No Removal Gym being some of the most blatant counter-cards ever printed.
The set essentially doubled the size of the metagame, at least in the west (where we didn't have the Vending series), so it shouldn't be surprising that it upended large portions of it.
While I already mentioned one Stadium card and kind of spoiled the surprise, this was one of the hot new ideas behind the set. Stadium cards represented places in the pokémon world lore-wise, and mechanically they functioned as passive effects that stayed in play until another Stadium card was played.
This allows for a lot of depth that simply wasn't possible in the game previously. While you could theoretically put the effect of Narrow Gym on a Pokémon Power, it would mean that one of your valuable bench slots is dedicated to that effect. And, crucially, you can't knock out a Stadium.
Closing Thoughts
Admittedly, the "owner's pokémon" which served as the core gimmick of the sets didn't exactly land. Most of the best cards were used in isolation, with no regard for who they belonged to. There were support cards for each gym leader, but they typically paled in comparison to the power level that the game was accustomed to.
The broken new cards introduced in the set were also insanely problematic. While the Base-Gym format has its defenders, it's pretty widely regarded as one of the most dramatically unbalanced formats in the game's entire history. Modern players have newer boogeymen like the infamous ADP and SableDonk decks. Old players had Trapper.
Stadiums would be a fixture of the game moving forward, though, so it would be disingenuous to say that these sets brought nothing to the franchise.
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