Speaking only for myself (I am not on Balance), I agree that "it's our fault" is not a compelling reason to treat the two cases differently.
However, I think would be at least two good reasons for Balance to treat the Empok Nor interaction differently from the Temporal Narcosis interaction, if that's what they decided to do:
(1) The Empok Nor deck depends entirely on surprise. It is easily countered by any opponent who takes the
de minimis defensive step of seeding Tribunal of Q and stocking It's Only A Game. (You don't even have to stock a full
tent if you don't wanna!) This defensive move is available to all decks in the game. If a player isn't willing to do it, especially at Worlds, then it isn't the game's job to remove all consequences for their refusal to defend at all -- at least, not an emergency basis.
Temporal Narcosis
can be countered, but it is much harder. (You can Kevin one copy of Revolving Door, but can you Kevin all five? If so, can you survive the
Oof! point loss?) Some decks (non-
decks, mainly) are much better at defending against Temporal Narcosis, which pushes the meta toward a specific kind of deck and cuts out a lot of diversity. That's the kind of thing that triggers my sensors, personally.
Both tricks are roughly equally devastating
if they succeed, but there's an easy way to prevent the Empok Nor trick from succeeding; not so much the Narcosis trick.
(2) There are "legitimate", non-cheese Empok Nor decks which would become collateral damage of an Empok Nor ban. By contrast, the
only reason to stock Temporal Narcosis in the current game is cheese. It is a 100% pure cheese card right now, and there can be no collateral damage from knocking it out.
All bans are a balancing of costs and benefits. The costs for banning Empok Nor (as I see it) are quite a bit higher, and the benefits quite a bit lower, than it would be for Temporal Narcosis...
if Balance decided to follow through on its threat here.
(It is worth mentioning here that Rules is also taking a look at this interaction. "Use" is not currently well-defined for all card types, so there are some questions about the details of this combo.)
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