Your latter posts are much more effective, blarp. I'm legitimately impressed that you can make a good argument for something I and other veteran community members oppose.
It is indeed true that a metagame consisting of shards is more diverse with more potential. It would be ideal if everyone in this event had every card; that would indeed make for a better competition.
But you have to combine metagame diversity with fairness in order to maximize entertainment and validity. Ideally we would have a very diverse metagame that is fair to every player, but this is not an option in the practical world.
Allowing shards would increase metagame diversity, but at a severe cost to fairness. The event would no longer test skill as much, and it would increasingly become a test of how much a player has grinded. Which really shouldn't be a factor for the PvP World Championship. Maybe if this was the PvP + AI World Championship, you could allow shards, but this competition is designed to focus solely on PvP and not AI griding. Overall, the slight increase to diversity by adding shards is not worth the decrease in fairness.
Now, look at the upgraded card rule. Allowing upgrades significantly increases metagame diversity at the cost of only a slight decrease in fairness, because most people have enough electrum and upgraded cards to play whatever deck they want.
Allowing shards would cause too large a decrease in fairness to be worth the increase in metagame diversity to be worth it. Upgrades, however, would be worth it.
You can have your 25 cents back.
