I guess I can see where you're coming from. But part of dwarven culture IS the massive possessions. And IMO, that's just part of the game. No other culture has an equivalent to elven bow, and gondor's IB ranger deck is way more broken than dwarven axe.
To be honest, I still don't quite know how dwarven axe would be abused enough to put it on the x-list. Could you give an example?
You see... the thing with abusing, IMO, is when you use a card in a different way than the way it was design to be used. Follow the game's history with me for a bit.
Dwarven Axe is a free +2 possession with a powerful ability. It was designed when dwarves were mostly Gimli and he had a better unique axe for himself, so it was not widely used. It didn't really matter if it was free or not, you were not playing multiples. You'd be better playing Legolas, Aragorn, Boromir or Arwen, instead of the other dwarves.
In two towers, came Rohan: THE possession culture. Even bearing that status, it didn't have free possessions in the power level of
dwarven axe.
Reflections came and along came
Durin III and all those dwarven companions, allowing you to play a decent stand alone dwarven fellowship.
Right here is where
dwarven axe became an abused card, because you could now play multiples of it, win skirmishes very easily and discard multiple cards from ur opponents deck. All of this wasn't allowed when it was first released.
See how the card changed completely due to its context? Dwarves weren't DESIGNED to be choke and strong LOL thing is they could now use all the dwarven cards that were useless, and they weren't powerful in the past with only one dwarf out... now they became powerful with a bunch of strong dwarves out... see?