Also, why is not playing to win such a foreign concept? I like winning, but it is not high on my list of priorities when playing Magic, unless I'm playing in a competitive setting. When playing casual Magic I want to have fun and try out wacky ideas and fun cards that I can't afford to play in a tournament.
Ignoring rhetorical tricks in question framing, I thought he did a pretty good job of explaning the issue:
It is the nature of any invented format that, with enough time and attention from enough dedicated deckbuilders, a metagame of accepted best decks and strategies will emerge...
...Once a format comes around to a phase when enough players have worked on it to develop its distinct metagame, players are faced with a choice: do they react to the metagame by tuning their own decks against it? Do they rally the format’s devotees into changing the rules or banning the cards that comprise the best deck?...
...The more anti-competitive format supporters will be inclined to resist the existence of the metagame, believing that since their format is “for fun,” it should be immune to the natural progression of deck improvement. People on the more competitive side are more inclined to embrace it, and a well-designed format should be able to support a diverse metagame without either collapsing or turning into a one-deck navel-gazing format.
Its really more an acknowledgement that people will try to meta your format (aka break it) and if they do so succesfully it will result in an unbalanced format, lacking in variety, as players gravitate towards a handful of effective strategies.
This manifests itself in our cubes most commonly with good stuff drafting, which is functionally the players telling you that they don't have to really care about what your cube was actually designed to do, and that they can just draft a bunch of junk every time. We can all agree that this is a real issue, that it leads to unfun environments, and if it is not acknowleged, ruins formats.
The issue than become, broadly, how do we respond to this phonomon? More narrowly, we have to choose between producing a balanced but diverse format, or curating the format so it never becomes stable enough for meta shifts to develop.
We've approached the balancing issues froma whole variety of ways, from custom cards, reducing cube size, to aggressive singleton breaking so a format revolves core interactions, to just agonizing how to better balanced archetypes and themes. We also have people that produce less stable formats by running huge cubes, or sticking aggressively to singleton formats, or even organizing their cubes into a number of "sub" cubes they can swap in and out. Some people are constantly adding or substracting huge numbers of cards, which has the effect of preventing a meta from ever settling. The funny thing is that I think most of this happens on a subconscious level.
The point is, we might still be in kitchan table top casual land (as are we all ultimately) but at least we are addressing these issues in a fun constructive manner, rather than getting irrationally angry at people for playing the format in a way allowed by its own constraints.
