Re: Blackmail and oppressive cards
I am of the opinion that a game should not be balanced around what “stomps noobs”. There are a lot of decks that are not fun for a beginner to play against.
If someone is playing Siphon MaxX against a new player and relishing in their inability to do anything – that’s a problem with the players. Get out some teaching decks or more standard archetypes and go from there.
If you are a new player in a tournament setting, you will get rolled by a lot of strategies, especially if it is your first time experiencing them. That process can be “unfun” but it should be expected if you want to play the game in a competitive manner. A new player should take those losses as a learning experience and try to identify how to prevent them in the future.
For a more in depth look at this idea:
“It’s Not Fun To Play That Way”
There are plenty of games that become more fun as you get better at them, rather than less fun. With a good game, getting better and better at it reveals more and more depth to you, rather than exposing the game’s shallowness.
Consider two groups of players who play a non-degenerate game: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often difficult to discover. The counter tactic prevents the first player from doing the tactic, but the first player can then use a counter to the counter. The second player is now afraid to use the counter and they’re again vulnerable to the original overpowering tactic. (See the Yomi Layer chapter of my book on Playing to Win or this more visual summary on yomi layers.)
Notice that the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other player from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of their own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.
The group of scrubs won’t know the first thing about all the depth I’ve been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more “fun.” Or to be more charitable, their argument could be that the game becomes less fun if they use tactic X, or character X, or whatever. That might be true temporarily until they figure out how to beat whatever it is, but ultimately the experts are having a more nuanced exchange, more opportunity for expression, for clever plays, for smart strategies, and so on.
The scrubs’ games might be more “wet and wild” than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn’t nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent’s mind to such a degree that you can counter their every move, even their every counter.
And if the two groups meet, of course the experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules. The actual game really should be more fun if it’s not degenerate.
