I've been playing since Ice Age, and my first competitive deck was Enchantress combo, so I totally feel you regarding mourning the relative power decrease of co

I've been playing since Ice Age, and my first competitive deck was Enchantress combo, so I totally feel you regarding mourning the relative power decrease of combo (and hard control) as archetypes. But you do spell out the exact reasoning for this, and I'm inclined to agree with Wizard's decision making here. I play mostly Modern and Legacy nowadays, in part because I prefer the older, more complex interaction heavy style of Magic, but even as an old hand I can appreciate how frustrating it is to lose to a hard control lock or a combo with which you have no way to interact. By allowing players to choose that play style, the game designers are basically saying, it's okay if there are (possibly a lot of) games of Magic in which one party has zero fun. Which is fine for some players, and you can still get that experience by playing older formats, but you have to agree that this is an unsaleable philosophy for a modern, mass-market game produced by a public company.