you can give artifacts and enchantments (and necessarily have to) different mechanical identities just on a card-by-card basis. If a red archetype is strong you can make an enchantment that helps to shut it down, for instance. The difference between an enchantment and an artifact independent of what the card does will still be something that can be felt by players although it will probably vary more from format to format than it used to, which is potentially a good thing rather than a bad thing.

I think the final take away is that artifacts and enchantments should never have been different things. Trying to overcome the problems of them being different things led to some weird issues. We're better off if we don't try to artificially inflate the differences, but that still leaves us with a some weird holdover distinctions.

yeah they had too many similarities to warrant being two supertypes

one of the big issues with magic is that its locked into a lot of **** design flaws because it can't really afford to rework central parts of the game now that its got decades of history

FoW and Caster Chronicles both have one and only one kind of normal non-creature permanent; Additions and Barriers respectively. FoW had Regalia but they were a block mechanic and also probably a mistake.

I've never missed the distinction.

The thing is, Magic does have the distinction so I think the game should own it. The pie differences in interaction are reason enough to want them to not be the same thing except flavor.

My main (minor) annoyance after reading maro's responses is probably that there will probably be limited formats where you don't care if something is an artifact or an enchantment and therefore the main distinction between two theorically otherwise perfectly identical permanents will be if you have enchantment removal or artifact removal in your deck, which feels wrong from a design standpoint in limited, since the player picking the card probably didn't care if it was an artifact or an enchantment.

Competitive constructed players should probably be annoyed that wizard has gained yet another tool to force them to switch deck between a set release and another by cherry picking what a certain permanent is weak to, but I still find the idea of competitively playing a tcg silly due to how bad a tcg model is to ensure a fair competition.

Almost all enchantment or artifact removal in green or white are in the style of Naturalize. Currently in Standard, we have Topple the Statue, Cleansing Ray, Crushing Canopy, and Demystify as cards that can only hit one type. For green/white, it won't make a difference imo. It's only red (and black) that can only destroy one of the types. Since red will still be able to destroy the usual colorless artifacts (your mana rocks, your 2/1 curve filler, your 5/5 for 6, etc.), it just means red can destroy more former enchantments.

I agree they should never have been different. but they were, and as Tevish points out it's too late to change that now, and since the distinction exists, pretending it doesn't isn't really a solution. it just creates an aesthetic mess where card types seem to be assigned primarily by coin-flip.

So the main reason we have both artifacts and enchantments at the creation of the game is flavor.

Current card type determined by flavor.

Don't see a problem.

From the beginning of the game, Artifacts should have been aura enchantments, and Enchantments - global enchantments.
There's enough difference between them to be different types, and it makes sense for artifacts to be localized physical objects creatures/lands/etc handle, while for enchantments - to be abstract and affect the game as a whole.