Well put! MTG is notorious in the huge gap between the potential complexity and the actual complexity of most games. I've found that deck design is a far more i

Well put! MTG is notorious in the huge gap between the potential complexity and the actual complexity of most games. I've found that deck design is a far more interesting problem than the in-game play strategy, and unfortunately most really interesting decks end up far too fragile or slow to compete with the optimal strategies. Someone really ought to design a format that bans all the straightforward but powerful cards, forcing a bit more creativity into the mix, but I fear the banned list would be prohibitively long and surprisingly difficult to come up with after the first round of obvious bans. There's always some new infinite combo that's a little too easy to pull off once the super fast quick wins are out of the way. Edit: there's always that person (I've occasionally been him) who doesn't play to win and just tries to mess with the game's limits as much as possible. I knew someone with a "Jester Deck" that played cards that so mangled the rules that no one could even figure out how to finish the game any more. That was pretty interesting.