What guidelines would you use to set up a tournament allowing only fair decks?
I think the first thing I would do is to call it something like Essential ANR or Basic ANR or Ice-Breaker ANR. I think the word fair creates misunderstanding.
Are there cards you would ban? What other way could you enforce the idea of fair ANR?
I don’t really like this idea as stated, but there is nothing wrong with putting in place the bans you think would be necessary to create a fun environment for everyone in your area.
I have heard of people talk about restricting card combos. That is, if you have X you cannot have Y.
Some examples: CtM and Sensie, Sifr and Parasite, Val and Blackmail.
Define “fair” versus “unfair”.
It’s easy to point at the extremes: Reg-Ass Leela is fair, Dyper is unfair. HB Foodcoats is fair, CI-7 is unfair.
But let’s go to the more blurred ones.
Is Shell Game PE fair? It doesn’t rely on economy as much, nor does it work off the ICE/Icebreaker interaction.
Is IG-54 unfair? It doesn’t play a combo of cards that randomly wins the game. It’s quite interactive.
Is Sunny Lebeau Prison fair? It’s barely interactive in the early game, and just like Dyper will have “technically won” in the lategame. It just takes longer for her to.
Is WyldCakes Whizzard with Faust unfair? It relies heavily on ICE/Icebreaker and economy battles and aims to actually steal agendas in every phase of the game.
My point is this: “fair” and “unfair” are terms people love to throw around, yet are incredibly hard to actually define. Netrunner is a massively complex game with countless interactions, and we players are extremely creative in making new ones.
Not only would a ban list like the one you speak of be extremely subjective, as everyone believes different interactions are fair or unfair, but you couldn’t possibly foresee everything players could come up with.
Somebody would read the ban list, think “Sweet, card X isn’t banned, I’ve been dying to try this combo”, show up to the tournament, and thus have made up a new “unfair” deck.
While I see where you’re coming from with returning to strait ICE vs (money-based) breakers, what I think would actually be more interesting is to go in the exact opposite direction. Without discussing things with others, I think everyone should bring what they think are the most unfair decks, and pit them against everyone else’s choice for unfair decks. I think there would be a pretty large number of people that would be surprised how hard their unfair decks can get shut down. This also solves the problem of defining what unfair is; leave it up to everyone to define it for themselves, and watch the carnage unfold on the tabletops =)
I defined them in my latest article.
Link? I’d love to read your thoughts 
IIRC the first Bio-Ethics Lock IG deck was published at NRDB by you 
And first Dumbleforks as well.
The problem is (as thebigboy lays out) that fair<>unfair is a continuum rather than clearly defined clusters.
Explicitly defining the card pool with allowed/unallowed cards is probably the most straightforward way of doing it.
An “Ice::Breaker” event might be interesting - rule that each Corp needs to have X or more ice in it, and that runners need to have at least one of each basic icebreaker type (and ban faust/blackmail).
You can make decks that you think are unfair. Normally they win tournaments 
Dumble has a special place in my heart obviously
The IG deck was a protest. I thought that BEA was a card that should not exist and I built that deck to prove why.
This is like building an atom bomb to prove that it is a bad idea to have one.
Yeah, I did a public service. Others were brewing it in secret…