The Importance of Balance in Magic

I often cite cosmic encounter as being one of my influences for magic. Cosmic encounter gives each player a way to break the rules, which is your alien power. And it's really, at least the version I played was super unbalanced and we knew it was. But that didn't bother us. We really enjoyed it. A friend who actually has been the head of R&D and wizards for a while took it upon himself to balance all the power so that they were all equally good. So this made me start really thinking of balance as not being something which you make for,. It's a much more, exposed balance with an audience over time.