First, I’m genuinely sorry if you feel i misrepresented your argument. My intention was to reply to the argument i thought you are making, and from reading your text i still feel that i understood it correctly.
I might have gone off on a bit of a tangent with regard to what constitutes ‘skill’ in a game however, since i find that interesting, which was not the core argument here.
Yes. Let us deal with this then.
This is my most concise counterargument:
If there is a skill called ‘Yomi’ separate from other types of skill it is easy to observe using data. If there is not, and it is entirely EV (expected value) valuation, or randomness, this experiment will show it.
Find a deck that both sides consider a heavily ‘Yomi’ deck (if mindpowers exist).
Putting words in your mouth here i assume you would agree with me that a deck that relies on Mushin as a core strategy to be able to win is an example of such a deck.
Now, simply playing on ‘expected value’ of high-variance events, or indeed it being more random, then this deck would be shown to be inferior to a good deck that has less of this property (the variance). This is because the more control a player has (‘possibility to exercise skill’) the more that player can use it to win.
I assume you know why this is, but for people who might not i’ll spell it out: playing in a large tournament greatly counteracts the swingyness of single games, leading to players who can scrape up consistently more wins crowding towards the top. Randomness in a deck goes against this, since if you are above average it will drag you down. If you are below average it will pull you up.
Thus my argument is this: if I can show that a Yomi-strategy can give consistently high results in a tournament-environment of other decks with less ‘inherent variance’ then player skill has to account for some of that disparity. Thus either that player is extremely skilled to compensate, or the properties of the deck can be used by that player to win, somehow, regardless of the variance.
This is my definition of Yomi:
While expected-value play (playing 33% of each in rock-paper-scissors, or betting proporionally to hand value in poker) is a base-strategy that is very important to follow in games of counterbalancing choices there is an oppurtunity to exploit people as soon as they are not using this base-strategy.
The argument that this is possible is that people are emotional, prone to falling into routines, gives of clear signals of intent or otherwise have a very hard time actually properly playing the NV base strategy. This is because finding and playing a base-strategy is very very difficult in a complex game. People fall back on patterns and emotional/experience-based strategies.
Then what Yomi is, really, is to yourself abandon the base strategy to play what counters their habit or pattern. The very simple example is this:
If you know that they play rock 50% of the time, it makes sense for you to start playing paper more. This will cause you to win more games.
Or to frame this in Netrunner:
If i know you will never run my traps, i will simply start Mushin’ing Ronins or agendas and win.
This means that a possibility for ‘Yomi-ing’ exist as soon as someone is not playing perfectly, which few people are. If you then are able to both pickup on, and to counterplay their choices then you are using the skill of Yomi.
I would like to restate the two links i found for you, i try to avoid having discussions by linking people stuff usually, but this directly adresses your point so well that if you are willing to engage in this discussion you really should read them to see whether they make you think differently:
http://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=2346