Great article today on Channel Fireball:

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles ... -standard/

I really like the proposal Brian DeMars makes; that Standard needs some unfun elements in order to be fun. It's a brave stance to take, but I think is honestly the correct one. The core of the game and why it grew so well was that you never knew what people were going to do or how they were going to do it because something scary and unknown might be around the corner! Sure this first guy may aggro you out, but the next one could be going land destruction, or perhaps a Wellwisher elfball combo.

Nowadays, Standard has very much become "play the pushed creatures, add some removal, add the pushed planeswalkers, and go to town". If you keep taking away parts of the game that some people enjoy, you're left with only the thing that appears to the lowest common denominator. Maybe that appeals to the most people (wide), but doesn't appeal very much to them (deep). Magic would do better to go a bit deeper than wider.

One issue is: Quality of deck building versus quality of gameplay.

They talk about it at the start of the article, how the top decks of the last few years have often been fun to play even if there hasn't been a lot of deck diversity.
Then at the end they recommend sacrificing that fun gameplay (by printing unfun cards) for the sake of deck diversity.

The question is whether this is the right move. Compared to similar games, Magic has always been more on the deck building side than the gameplay side, especially now compared to digital card games. (I tried to go into more detail here but couldn't figure out exactly what I wanted to say. Might pick this up later).

You're right that there needs to be a balance between the two. For myself, I'd like to see more on the deckbuilding side because I've always enjoyed having decks that were an extension of myself. It's why I enjoy the Commander format so much.

He definitely has some good points there. While I hate to see unfun cards dominate, a few are needed as safety valves.
The tentpole nature of current sets is also a big problem. So much power is concentrated in so few cards. It's often pretty obvious what the must play cards are going to be at release, and they stay the must plays throughout rotation.