Should Fun Triumph Over Balance? | Bricky Reaction 

In my sincere opinion. Fun should be focused on most games. Competitive games should focus on balance with fun aspects and mechanics to add depth. In a more casual game especually pve type games balance doesn't matter much. For example total war warhammer on the campaign side as opposed to online battles. Campaign very imbalanced but online battles quite balanced all things considered

I liked the original Taric and he went through so many reworks that it ruined why I liked him. He wasn't good, but he was fun.

2:46 Bricky is censoring his character with his laptop. Seriously though obviously fun is key, however as you say, there are different kinds of fun, a game like They Are Billions demonstrates this very well because you can tone the game up to near impossible levels and it remains fun, because the challenge comes at specific points and the in-between sections are a great city builder. It also makes it more rewarding when you win, and that is better than a game that is frustrating all the way through, even if the game that us frustrating all the way through is technically more balanced. I do feel you on card games. Currently I play the One Piece TCG which aside from 1 or 2 decks (one of which is getting banned in June) is in a really good place right now, and I also play the fourth starter leader which works out great sometimes, because people haven't seen him for so long they've forgotten what he does and are completely caught off-guard when I use his ability. He's also part of a good deck in general.

I one heard a game design teacher define a fun game as: giving players interesting options all the time. And I feel I agree with that. If everything is too balanced, the impact of your choices is diminished by the feeling you made a bad choice or you chose wrong, a lot of the times you get counterpicked and all you can do is try your best to not die... And that's not great. On the flip side, there are points where no matter what you chose, you win, and while that might be fun for a bit, it isn't sustainable, because you start to feel as long as you stick to the same formula, you'll will deterministically win, that's not a choice at that point. Deck building games are interesting because they are sort of 2 games in one: the obvious one is the sitting down and playing against an opponent. But a lot of the fun in tcgs is the seccond game of building your own deck. Getting a theme and building around it, it is making interesting choices with a purpose, be it be effective and try to win the game in 2 turns, or build a deck that changes the rules of the game, or just, idk, pirates creating a ton of tresures and having the opponent's creatures commit mutiny. Of course, what really are choices, and what are interesting choices is as subjective as what's the individual's definition of fun.

If you want to talk about changes to rules that fundamentally alter the game, Yugioh's a good place to start. The introduction of Link Monsters was an absolute disaster with Firewall Dragon taking the cake, and it really messed with both Pendulum Summons and the Extra Deck. The next rule update (Master Rules 5) fixed some of the issues, but if you're a Pendulum kinda duelist you'll still be longing for the days of yore.