It’s funny they mentioned Magic: the Gathering, because the first thing I thought of when reading the headline is all the conversation I see in r/EDH, and less frequently in other related subreddits, about a reluctance or even disdain for “optimal” play, which would be trying to win as efficiently as possible. To preserve the excitement and surprise of gameplay, people discourage building decks out of “staple” cards that would quickly homogenize play. “Broken” or “busted” cards that turn out to be more powerful than anticipated by the game’s designers wind up banned in sanctioned tournament play.
EDH is especially prone to it as a format, because it's a format which allows almost every card ever printed (with a pretty... inconsistent banlist). This makes for some pretty wild variations in power levels, and the top end tends to be both very samey and very expensive. It's very popular as a format but it only really works because there's a culture of trying to match power levels between decks (to be fair, there's also the fact that 100 card singleton does tend to mean it's hard to be completely consistent, so there's a lot more 'bleedover' between power levels in terms of chance to win in a given match, as well as the >2 player aspect levelling things out as a player obviously in the lead will tend to be ganged up on)
EDH is the variant of the game for people who aren't that competitive. They spend a lot of time trying not to win too hard. The format is fine but I don't like it beacuse of this culture around it, it basically has this social metagame where you can get better players removed out of play by complaining about them.
Draft, Standard and Modern are for people who want a real game without having to worry about playing too well.
If you’re going to play MTG as a simple game theory optimal affair, might as well switch to poker… a Nash equilibrium surely exists all the same, but charm of the game is in the variety and checks & balances.
Well, from the perspective of optimal play the more complex and changing nature of MTG means that optimal play is harder to find and doesn't stay still, so there's a lot more metagame of figuring out what that play is.
