The last actual format of MTG I played was "competitive" EDH, weekly tournaments on Tuesday nights.
Banlist makes perfect sense once you actually start tuning EDH decks to be competitive rather than circlejerk multiplayer piles. I don't agree with fully all of it, and a number of them are banned for purely multiplayer reasons, but it's not just some random pile.
At the dude with Zur problems, I play Zur, and really it sounds like your problem is that Zur is getting to turn sideways multiple times per game. That's gonna nearly always be a loss, or at best a very very uphill battle. Your strategy mostly needs to revolve around not letting Zur do that, and after he has to recast him at +2 a few times he'll run out of mana to play him reliably and protect him.