Watching Bungie struggle to "balance" the PVP side of their game, only to end up pissing everybody off, has seemed strangely familiar... but I couldn't put my finger on it. Today, it hit me. Back in the mid-90's, I got introduced by a friend to this new type of card game that had recently come out: Magic The Gathering. This was a first-of-its-kind game where you bought packs of random cards (or loose ones from your game shop), and made your own balanced deck with what was available. You'd build a deck based on a theme, or idea, or even just the most powerful thing you lucked out in buying, then tested it out, and tinkered as necessary. It was brilliant! We had gotten into it when the main set being sold was Revised (Third Edition, for all intents and purposes), and between the expansions The Dark and Fallen Empires. Now, the original sets of cards (Alpha/Beta, then Unlimited) had some cards the developers thought were game-breaking, because they provided a slight advantage to kids willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for boxes of booster packs. So things like Moxes and Black Lotuses were removed. Then Fourth Edition came out, and they decided things like Dual Lands and Demonic Tutor were too powerful under the new meta, so those got the axe too. And things were no better on the expansion side either, as things got more and more watered down, more and more tame, lest they make some player too powerful. By the time Alliances came out, and before Fifth Edition, I had quit the game. The only way I can describe it to this community is thus: imagine if you started the game getting rares and exotics, and as time went on and you got more powerful you THEN started getting blues, then greens, then nothing but whites. The entire Homelands expansion of Magic was nothing but whites. So imagine my surprise 15-years later when I pick up an IOS version of Magic: The Gathering just for nostalgia's sake, and I see that the game designers apparently had a wake-up call, and took the game in the OPPOSITE direction! Those early first-edition cards were removed because they gave you one extra resource point early in the opening stages of the game, but now suddenly there were cards that let you win automatically if you played them! Just boom, I win! And it was like that all across the rarity levels and colors you could play from, cards that seriously upset the balance, and made you have to think fast or lose, learn defense or lose, etc.... Just ungodly powerful spells and creatures all over the place! And you know what? IT WAS FUN!!! So fun in fact that I picked up other IOS versions of the game, just to see what else was new. Bungie could learn from this. They sacrificed fun on the Altar of Balance, and there was no reason for it. There are two ways to balance: we could all run around with single-shot Nerf guns (the way they have it now)... OR, you could give everybody Gjallahorns with Icebreakers duck-taped on top that shoot Nova Bombs on rapid fire. Put some speed in our Guardian Gatorade. We'd all be on the same playing field, only now we'd be having... what's that word again? Oh yeah... FUN! That's what Wizards of the Coast did with Magic, and it's what seems to have saved the property some 20+ years after I gave up on it.