It sounds to me like you are creating a cube that's purposefully unfun so that you can contrast it with your cube philosophy and create a false dichotomy.
Honestly, a lot of what you state sounds really patronizing to me and designed to gaslight people. I feel verbally abused and I believe others do, as well.
I honestly don't think you could have come up with a more bad faith reading of my design goals if you tried. Wow.
1) Fun is subjective. Not objective. There is no such fucking thing as objectively fun or unfun. For you, maybe retail limited is a boatload of fun, maybe for me it isn't. But I'm fully capable of designing a game that isn't my cup of tea in every possible way and instead caters to a different demographic so collectively myself and the other players can have a more enjoyable time. @Metallix87 is famous for his saying "Magic is like pizza and sex, even really bad Magic is still a pretty good time." I might not be IN LOVE with a lower power, lower decision density, higher power delta cube in the same way that I am with my main cube, but that's fine, I'll still have fun anyway, because Magic is fun, even if some forms of it are more fun for me than others.
2) The needs of less experienced players are very different than those of more experienced and "spikier" players. I play Magic with a lot of people and while my core cube playgroup is a bunch of former or current grinders and they are all fairly experienced that isn't true of some of my good and close personal real life friends who still like playing Magic from time to time. I can't just break out my normal cube and draft it with less experienced players, they won't have a good time. The format is too challenging, too decision intensive, and requires far too much of an in depth understanding of the game for them to be able to have a chance when they play against anyone of an unequal and higher skill level. These less experienced players I know maybe only draft retail limited occasionally on arena, if at all, and mostly engage with the game on a casual level. They aren't super invested, they don't know what a "xerox deck" is, they have no clue how to concoct a consistent fetch/dual manabase for a 3+ color deck, they don't know when they should play a significantly reduced land count and as a result they struggle immensely during deckbuilding and sideboarding. I want a cube that can be at their skill level, that can allow them to have an easier time doing the many challenging things that draft sometimes asks of them, and I want them to be able to win games significantly more often, even though they are sometimes much lower skill than their opponents so they can have an enjoyable experience playing the game instead of getting frustrated and wanting to do something else. And I can design a format that achieves these goals far better than any traditional booster product can as those packs have to contain cards for all sorts of other demographics in order to be a successful product, but my noobie cube can focus almost entirely on giving a satisfactory experience to my less experienced friends.
I think it's mostly about language. I don't think I have any problems with different opinions rwgarding cube design. It's just a game arter all. But I can see where japahn is coming from, too. I hope funch stays with us, but maybe can formulate his thoughts without phrases like "noob shit", "boomer junk" or a dozen versions of "fuck".
His posts sound to me like the opposite of respectful, and I don't think I've felt so disrespected in... years? It's impressive how he can sound so toxic to me and other people, and yet completely ok to you and Jason. My guess (and it's just a guess) is because I come from a high-context culture, and other people might be from low-context cultures. So I'm used to reading between the lines. And his message is crafted so that it explicitly says something more or less ok, but it's downright ugly if you read between the lines.
I know my manner of speaking can rub a lot of people the wrong way but I simply ask that you try to look past the colorful and vulgar adjectives to understand the actual substance of what I'm saying and I will try my best to be more mindful and phrase things in ways that maybe don't seem as inherently off-putting, although I can make no guarantee that I will always succeed in this, I hope you can instead assume the best intentions and politely ask for clarification if and when I inevitably slip up, rather than simply assuming I'm trying to attack you.
I was born and raised in New York City, everyone there has a mouth like a sailor, not just truckers and construction workers, but tiny grandmas too. To say my cultural background is low-context would be an understatement. These words simply don't convey the same level of offense here as they might where you and some other folks are from and also if you go back and read my posts you'll see that not a single one of these swears is EVER targeted at another individual, it's always at inanimate objects (magic cards). When I say Venser is a shitty card, I'm not saying the people who play with Venser are shitty people. Conflating the two is a totally dishonest way of reading my points and is reading things between the lines that simply aren't there. There is no underlying and unstated insult lurking beneath the surface, I said what I said, and only what I said, and I didn't mean anything other than exactly what I said. I'm not trying to trick you and sneak in some well disguised insults. I'm not trying to insult anyone. I simply don't have any emotional investment in singular cards, to me, they are simply game pieces, tools we game designers use to achieve our goals. There's no value judgment attached when I say a card is bad, bad cards can serve useful purposes just as much as good cards can and like when @Jason Waddell spoke of True-Name Nemesis there are circumstances where a good card can contextually be bad for one's design goals. We all know Black Lotus is a really fucking good card, but many of us exclude it for equally good reasons.
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