I didn’t have a chance or resources to answer that post more thoroughly, systematically and in detail last time, but I suppose I’ll take the opportunity to do so now.
You know, the general problem with your approach, in my view, is short-sightedness: you focus too much on details of particular cards and decks, the ‘meta’ right now and so on. Instead, I’d suggest to take a step away from all that and look at the game in perspective: for example, what has it looked like over the course of ten years? And when you do so, what do you find? Apparently, the ever-perpetuating cycle of hope, hype and disappointment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUpsudGHiRU
.
In that light, I intentionally chose to ignore particulars about the ‘meta’ etc, since this is probably one of the ways to get stuck in the delusion of that vicious cycle.
There’s another big issue related to the model of Standard HS in general, and that’s the reason why so-called power creep (and thus also insanity creep?) is seemingly inevitable. I think that ‘Old Guardian’ fellow has discussed it in one of his videos, but I don’t feel like looking for it now, so I’ll just explain it in my own words.
Let’s assume you have a powerful card set (‘set’ in a maths-like sense, in HS terms that’d actually be three ‘card sets’ or ‘expansions’, but no matter) for a Standard year X. Obviously, it means that year X+1 cannot be less powerful than that, so if you’re trying to tone down the ‘power creep’ and ‘insanity’, you could only do it in the year X+2, when the card set of year X rotates out. However, that, in turn, would require the cards from year X+1 to be toned down as well — and is it really feasible and possible? If set X+1 is much weaker than set X, then there’s no incentive for players to buy it, and that’s a failure for the company (by the way, the same pertains to set X+2 in relation to X+1, obviously). Thus, the alternatives are as follows: either you essentially ‘skip’ a whole year in terms of sales and releasing useful cards for a healthier meta in the next year earliest, or just keep ramping up the ‘madness’ and the sales. The choice is quite obvious, but even if they did choose the former option for a healthier game state in the long term, I’m not even sure many players would appreciate it (here’s a classic… Classic… example… Hmm, what a pun it turned out to be), besides, there’s also this ‘excitement’ trend, as aptly noted above.
As a result, I’d expect all the ‘madness’, ‘power creep’ etc in HS to increase steadily (see my post above about ‘progress’) and not the other way around.
Of course, there are possible alternatives to that model in general, such as overall rebalancing from time to time to compensate for the accumulated power creep, for example, but they haven’t done it in HS, and there’s no sign that they intend to do so.
Interesting. I don’t remember if I read this particular piece before, although I think OG discussed similar themes, including some (other?) comments from designers in his videos. It all adds up…