banned.

Why do we have setups that are only good for casual mode entering the competition? It seems that every second round we have the Sheriff/Blacksmith setup returned to the rota, and it drowns out every other setup. Why is this setup allowed, but Fool Training 3 isn't?

The problem is that it is the exact opposite of what competitive setups should be. As an example, let's compare SDS and the Sheriff setup. SDS goes into an immediate crisis mode for town: if Doc doesn't save, the town goes to MYLO. Similarly, but in a far stupider way, the Sheriff setup starts at Day, and allows one person to put the town into MYLO with the gun.

As soon as a Sheriff kills a villager, the town has to scumhunt at a disadvantage. They (a) have no reports, (b) can't reveal PRs because of the hooker, and (c) can't look for mafia interactions because mafia don't know each other and there are no interactions. For town, it's like scumhunting in the pregame lobby, (and lynching based on pregame is OGI in any other setup by the way).

But wait, it gets worse! Half the Sheriff players fire off their gun without asking for claims, which means that this "competitive" setup is no better than a Sandbox match where everyone gets a gun. People don't play to their win conditions when they get a gun. You don't have to convince anyone to shoot, you just do it. And by not asking for PR claims, the Sheriff is essentially avoiding their win condition which is to eliminate the mafia ONLY, with as little town collateral as possible.

There are so many setups* which are of a competitive standard yet somehow this one, which is not up to standard, is consistently the most played setup. Ban this setup from competition and make it a red heart game so that we can actually play competitive mafia without having to hope that the person who rolls sheriff actually cares about playing the game.

*TEO, VDLI, Janitorial 2.0, SDS, PAU, Classic, Basic Variant, LOBL, S&L, O2R, Basic Logic, B2Basics, B2Night School are all worthy.