@protoaddict said in November 18, 2019 Banned and Restricted Announcement:
I'm not sure it is ok for you to be the arbiter of what is universally fun or unfun in any circumstance, as it is by definition a subjective judgement, including it being a neutral one.
I think we're in agreement here. That was entirely my point. Brainstorm is a card that makes the game more fun for me, and less fun for you. Therefore we can't just blanket state that it's fun or unfun, because that's subjective. I wasn't trying to make the claim that the card is fun-neutral. I certainly don't believe that I can arbitrate which cards are universally fun, my position is that nobody can do that, that different people like different games and it's impossible for any card to be universally fun or unfun.
Maybe my post needed more context. Even though the WotC explanation for the Narset restriction was "fast mana and draw spells", there have been several high profile comments in high visibility places about Narset being fun police. What comes first to mind is LSV's tweet that Narset stops him from doing the things he enjoys in Vintage. Make no mistake, of the people involved in the B&R decision process, more of them follow LSV on Twitter than have accounts on TMD. The idea that Narset stops people from having fun doing "Vintagey" things is one of the reasons why it was restricted. It is very probably not the only reason, but it's the one I was reacting to.
Anyway, my point is that judging anything from the perspective of fun is not a good metric.
That's trouble, because I think you make some good points there, and I strongly believe that making policy decisions based on fun has some real problems. Some cases seem clear cut, but others get vague very quickly, and I think it ultimately always comes down to picking specific groups of players to exclude, whether the deciding body is conscious of it or not.
But on the other hand, it's also sort of the only thing that matters. Because more easily measurable metrics like card diversity, strategic diversity, metagame penetration, win rate, game length, decisions per game, deck cost, etc ... these are all just proxies for the only question that matters: Do I want to spend my afternoon playing Vintage, or have a cup of coffee?
We know that basing policy decisions on fun doesn't work, but at the same time, we know that the only way to make policy decisions is to base them on fun, if only indirectly. C'est Absurde!