A better description of the concept is something along the lines of:
"Don't worry if your game is balanced, just change it around every month before players figure it out, get frustrated, and leave."
the thing about this is that it
describes mtg perfectly.
By extension, we've had the expectation of the same type of constant change forced onto our cubes.
In fact, I'd argue that it describes most popular multiplayer games, the games you might describe as exceptions to this are either extreme flukes and also probably had few players stick around once they are done with their personal discovery phase. (examples: marvel vs capcom 2, street fighter 2 super turbo, smash melee, counterstrike, quake, shit even games like chess). The success of all these games relied on so many factors that were far outside of the vision of the creators. I almost put starcraft broodwar in that list, but it had constant updates in the form of new 3rd party maps that constantly shifted the optimal strategies.
Note that all of these games (even chess) have been criticized for their longstanding imbalances!
And one might bring up that for example, in Super Turbo (a 20 year old game), Dhalsim beats Boxer, and Boxer beats Claw, and Claw beats Dhalsim. Seems like a simple enough RPS relationship, a metagame balancing thing. But the thing fighting games have is very simple: you can switch characters between games in a match, or between matches. You can go from being the control deck to the aggro deck. Imagine if in Starcraft, you rushed during game 1 in the first round of a tournament, and now you're stuck with your 5Pool Zerg Rush for the rest of the tournament, and that's it, no switching. That'd be ridiculous, it wouldn't make sense, unless such a strategy isn't just a simple RPS choice. But that's what trying to build RPS matchups into magic is equivalent to. and that's why they're undesirable.
Someone could bring up that fighting games have
notably many possibilities to force through bad matchups with differences in player skill. But for every one of those,
there's a thousand of these (i just found the last two by typing "dhalsim yun" and "3rd strike chun" into youtube without having any particular vid in mind!)
in a sense, that's sort of false hope. but in a lot of ways, mtg doesn't even give you that. and honestly that's not really a good thing, like i said, it's a side effect of actual good things. but at least in these other games, you can change your strategy mid-tournament. with regard to draft you're fighting over resources from start to end, and a sideboard doesnt really actually fix a bad matchup.
I'd also argue that MTG simply isn't an inherently interesting enough game to keep people entertained forever without constant updates and shifting. Or rather, the updates and shifting balance are part of what is inherently interesting about MTG. "Swing of the pendulum" to go for the maro-speak.
also "balance" means like 30 million different things to different people because I suspect there won't be any consensus on these questions:
if a matchup has a 50/50 win rate, but every time you draw card X you win that game for free, is card X balanced?
is a game less balanced if you have 16 equally good options and you add a 17th less good option?
if a game has 6 equal "character" choices, but 4 of them force you to make very similar strategic choices (and deviating from that is playing suboptimal), is this game more balanced than a game with 6 character choices where the characters are less equal but there are several optimal strategies?
in less confusing terms, if there's 5 exact copies of a character in a game, they are balanced, but there's a 6th character that is different that is worse, is that more balanced than a game with 6 very different characters?
is it more useful to talk about the full range of balance or ignore certain outliers?
Should every option even be viable? The answer is probably no, because then you could just pick cards at complete random during the draft and end up with a viable deck, right?
if there's a magic card that wins every game it's played in unless the opponent knows a secret password that counters that spell for no mana cost, is that balanced?
if a deck somehow existed where you could literally make no choices, but you would still win 40% of your games, is it balanced? What if there was no way to use skill to increase this rate about 40%?
is goblin charbelcher killing you on turn 1 balanced?
if everyone in legacy can play
wasteland decks if they wanted to, yet the card "warps the format" around it, is it balanced?
