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All of these decks share a common root: they eliminate the dynamism and excitement that comes with constructive interaction between cards, largely because their goal is to ignore as much of the rules text on the opponent's cards as possible.

Two reasons for this jump out immediately:
1. Magic has always been cast as a battle between wizards, where the object is to defeat your foe(s). Given such a destructive metric for success, expecting cooperation between the players seems little more than a pipe dream. Could a cooperatively-metrized variant of Magic take off? Possibly, but due to the fundamental concepts that make Magic Magic, I doubt such a thing would even remain interesting for long.
2. With the idea of drawbacks becoming all but extinct in recent years, all the rules text on all the cards amounts to pretty much the same fundamental thing: "Add 5% to your win probability" or "Add 30% to your win probability" (the latter on cards deemed "swingy" enough to need a red expansion symbol). When you're pretty much assured that every one of your opponent's cards is strictly positive for them (and thus strictly negative value for you), preemptively shutting them down gives you a pretty good idea of what you're gaining. Granted, if a card has negative value, it probably isn't going to go in a deck to begin with, but the combination of competitively-costed cards with drawbacks can be crafted so that the value fluctuates, possibly including both negative value and a value high enough to earn a spot in the deck, which would help to create the environment of "using the opponent's cards against them" that R&D seemingly wants as an answer to the question "Why would I want my opponent to even be able to get their cards out, if each of those cards is just going to help me lose?"

Oct 16, 2011 -- 9:52PM, SadisticMystic wrote:

The key passage for me was this (in regard to why decks like Draw-Go are no longer made viable):

All of these decks share a common root: they eliminate the dynamism and excitement that comes with constructive interaction between cards, largely because their goal is to ignore as much of the rules text on the opponent's cards as possible.

Two reasons for this jump out immediately:
1. Magic has always been cast as a battle between wizards, where the object is to defeat your foe(s). Given such a destructive metric for success, expecting cooperation between the players seems little more than a pipe dream. Could a cooperatively-metrized variant of Magic take off? Possibly, but due to the fundamental concepts that make Magic Magic, I doubt such a thing would even remain interesting for long.
2. With the idea of drawbacks becoming all but extinct in recent years, all the rules text on all the cards amounts to pretty much the same fundamental thing: "Add 5% to your win probability" or "Add 30% to your win probability" (the latter on cards deemed "swingy" enough to need a red expansion symbol). When you're pretty much assured that every one of your opponent's cards is strictly positive for them (and thus strictly negative value for you), preemptively shutting them down gives you a pretty good idea of what you're gaining. Granted, if a card has negative value, it probably isn't going to go in a deck to begin with, but the combination of competitively-costed cards with drawbacks can be crafted so that the value fluctuates, possibly including both negative value and a value high enough to earn a spot in the deck, which would help to create the environment of "using the opponent's cards against them" that R&D seemingly wants as an answer to the question "Why would I want my opponent to even be able to get their cards out, if each of those cards is just going to help me lose?"

"Dynamic and constructive interaction between cards" does not mean "cooperative" AT ALL.  It means that the cards simply MATTER to each other, not that the two players are trying to make their cards be friends.

Think about the current crop of black removal.  No single spell is Terminate, because Terminate is too good for monocolor.  Terminate is boring.  Instead each spell has its own weakness to their targets, so a deck playing different targets INTERACTS with the other causing interesting play situations, or in another word: Fun.

What I think is interesting is that while R&D has the goal of game balance and funness, competitive magic players/Spikes have the absolute opposite goals.  They look for the most unbalanced, advantageous cards, fun be damnned.  It is neither group's fault to have diametrically oppossing goals, and try to succeed at both.

As a thought experiment, I imagined what would happen if they printed a sorcery that said: "You tie the game."  Not a very fun card I would hope, by anyone's metric.  You simply stop playing Magic, when you sat down to play Magic.  But it would totally see competitive play, because if you get ahead in a match there would be great incentive to tie out every other game.  Of course you play less Magic this way, but that's not the point.  The point is to win.

But WOTC's point is to PLAY not win.  So I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you feel like they're being unfair to us by setting goals that we don't share, it's not their fault.