There's actually a relevant New Yorker article to this concept in which a girl's basketball team wins by playing the full court press and everyone else in the league gets really pissed off.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell
In the context of the above article the winning team succeeds by playing to win by the actual rules of the game even though everyone complains that they're being cheap/unsportsmanlike etc. I haven't read it in awhile, but I remember it being a good read, and it provides many more examples of the above outside of the realm of Street Fighter.
That's an excellent article and a great supplement to "Play to Win". It makes me wonder... at what point is too much really too much? I mean, Dominion, especially on Isotropic, is pretty safe -- there's hardly any player interaction. No disheartening or incapacitating your opponent (unless maybe you're hacking somehow). The worst you can do is probably play a bajillion King's-Courted Possessions and take over all your opponents' turns.
Overall, I think that this community is fairly competitive, and open-minded about what's considered "legitimate" competition. Most players I've seen don't get mad when you IGG/Duchy-rush or Double-Jack them. If they don't have a counter prepared, well, they'd better do the same thing or they're gonna lose. They don't complain that you're not playing a "straight-up" game. They don't whine that you're "cheesing" them as Starcraft players are wont to do. I haven't heard of anyone going to Donald X. and complaining that he should rebalance Dominion so that Provinces are the only way to win.
I think a major reason for that is that the appeal of Dominion, for many of us, is the versatility. We
like alternative strategies. We don't have a fixed concept of what a Dominion game "should" play like, because every Kingdom setup is different. The strategy you used to win on one board is probably literally
impossible on another random board. Some boards have rock-paper-scissors strategy interactions; some others just have one strategy that wins almost every time. Sometimes a particular combination of cards makes a single strategy nigh-unbeatable; but an adequate counter may make it inferior on other boards. And this is normal: the cards and the game itself are open-ended, and you never know what new possible interactions may pop up. That's what Dominion's about, so the community is self-selecting towards people who appreciate these qualities.
Obviously there are players like Phule who think that using Possession is bad sportsmanship. I myself am not a fan of some cards that tend to reward runaway leaders and overly lengthy turns, like King's Court. That's normal. But I'm glad that vetoing every seemingly "imbalanced" or unpalatable card isn't the norm here. In this community, we shun the people who complain about losing, not the players who win with "unfun" strategies. I think that speaks well for both the game itself and this website.
