I think this is a slightly different issue. In Magic there's a concept of "strictly better" where one card is deemed to be always better than another (eg Lightning Bolt over Shock), as opposed to statistically better (eg Silver Knight is generally considered better than White Knight but the latter is clearly preferable if you're playing against black and not red). However, some people take "strictly better" too, um, strictly, and try to point out weird cases where you would prefer to have the seemingly worse card. Often these scenarios involve Mindslaver (eg if you're on 3 life and your opponent has Mindslaver you'd rather have Shock in hand than Lightning Bolt).

The lesson is to not let rare pathological cases ruin useful generalizations (at least not outside of formal mathematics).