Yea I guess I don’t really understand the focus on this in his post.
I think when people talk about power creep they don’t mean a uniform scaling in power, whether that means increase or decrease. Or rather they are talking about the effect even a uniform power creep has on the game, which is certainly not a uniform effect.
Certainly, when the devs print cards, even if they kept relative power differences between cards similar or stable, but increased power uniformly, you’d have the effect that cards that were relatively equal in power before the increase, are no longer anywhere equal, because certain synergies between cards kick in and make those other cards obsolete.
Put more concisely in mathematical terms, the power level of cards doesn’t make sense to think about individually or in a vacuum. The power of each card is better modeled by at least pairwise interactions, and better yet by n-wise interactions. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume pairwise as it’s already a much better model. In this model, a cards overall power is described by either pow(x) = max pow(x,y) or sum pow(x,y) where x and y are cards, and the max or sum is over y and pow(x) is the overall power of the card. Notice how we have to marginalize over all other possible cards when considering pairwise card power. In the n-wise terms the same thing happens but the marginalization is over all n cards.
In any case, this means each cards power level is some function of other cards power level along with it’s own power. As a single cards power increases, it increases the power level of all related cards that synergize with it. This means a synergies between cards, or interactions between them become more and more important as power creeps, even if that power creep is uniform.
This can be seen in the meta. Just look at BSM, there is a critical point after there is enough synergies that all involved cards become a meta defining deck. Pretty much the same thing happens with every meta deck we are seeing, it’s the power creep and the synergies between cards that defines the meta.
This should also emphasize the importance of keeping power creep low. As creep scales, even uniformly, predicting toxic interactions and balancing the meta to avoid them becomes harder and harder.