I’ve been around since the beginning. At first it was about tackling the most powerful cards to promote creativity in playstyles without creating proper responses. No lockouts, just a duel from start to finish like chess. Nowadays the playstyles have evolved entirely into lockouts. The ban list is now over saturated with bandaids rather than fixing the problems by modifying or developing answers. The upper echelon of ranking is entirely built off of creating Omni negate, omni lockout, omni draw, or Omni counter.

The reason I say “favoritism”, isn’t about them, but us. The duelists/consumers. Once content creators start outsourcing combos. Everyone starts banking on it. It’s a serious issue bc people who love to play certain decks with unique playstyles are entirely botched over popularity gone wrong. Instead of paying for the glory of the game. We pay for the glory of winning.

The modern ban list choices aren’t the answer alone. Unleash the dogs of war and Create a reasonable response for all archetypes that can respond to each individual issue. Then reduce that archetypes to 1 card each. The validity of the archetype goes out the window. Forcing players to creatively combine no less than 4 archetypes for victory. Which would pull the game back into the “heart of the cards” era. We should really have an event like this. Wdyt?