I know this is my personal issue, if anyone is following me on Twitter and has seen me have this rant over and over, but something's wrong in Magic the Gathering. The game has a complexity issue--It's been around a lot time, that's something to be expected, but the degree to which they keep worsening it is impressive.
Alchemy really shows the limits to which current templating is stretched beyond belief. I mean, obviously there's cards like Animate Dead and Oubliette that are trivial to explain but difficult to word in the rules, but ... basic concepts like state tracking not existing as something changes zones resulting in some of the most wordy bullshit to ever come across cards. Tons of cards have perpetual solely because player counters are very strange, but because they're worded like cards would be with experience counters, you just get...
Starting intensity 1 Whenever Bellowsbreath Ogre attacks, it deals damage equal to its intensity to any target, then perpetually increase its intensity by 1.
But the thing that keeps getting to me after playing Eternal Card Game is just how much WotC doesn't use keywords enough.
Look, I know keywords are scary. The reason they try to not use them out of set is because "it'll be confusing to new players" -- an excuse that I personally despise when there are 0 vanilla creatures and only 40 french vanilla (of which, 14 either have prototype/ninjutsu/daybound, making them Still Complicated) creatures in standard. That is not simplifying anything. In fact, it's making it worse the moment they just reuse a mechanic unkeyworded in the next set, which they do constantly. Fledgling players have to go "wait, what makes this different from Landfall" or "what makes this different from surveil" or countless other mechanics that they've failed to just standardize.
The icing on the damn cake though, the thing that pisses me off, is that there are 10 times as many cards with triggered abilities as there are french vanilla creatures. Hell, there are almost twice as many commons with triggers as there are french vanillas.
You're really going to tell me that the stack and triggers are easier to understand and resolve than just making another keyword someone has to look up? Maintaining the difference between "putting a card into your hand" "putting a card into play" "drawing" "casting" and actively putting that shit on new cards is all simple, without keywords? The arbitrary distinction on a spell fizzling based on how the target ability is actually worded? I don't care that 90% of those triggers on new cards are "when X enters/leaves the battlefield", the thing is, Magic has a LOT of wordy text around those states! Eternal has Summon/Entomb, which WotC should go ahead and steal to simplify the hell out of most cards. Throw in a "Whenever X attacks" -- and do SOMETHING to clarify "put it onto the battlefield tapped and attacking" which is NOT THE SAME AS WHEN IT ATTACKS, AND IS SOMETHING YOU ALSO KEEP PRINTING.
just. use. your. damn. keywords.
Doesn't even fucking get into sets getting to steal mechanics from other sets, which led to the jankiest releases of the last few years with things like Adventures in the Forgotten Realms not getting to use PARTY, the actual mechanic for MAKING AND CARING ABOUT AN ADVENTURING PARTY, or Neon Dynasty losing Hack to become Cleave in Innistrad (which had... no ties to anything mechanically or storywise, literally just existing so they could print cards like [V]indicate?). Or just... other things I would call design missteps, like prototype being a hell of a weird mechanic for state tracking, or the fact that ONE has two separate types of tokens + oil counters to track in addition to stat counters, or that they DID actually reuse a keyword in Battle Cry in ONE but did that in the same set they added a new keyword that IS a battle cry (For Mirrodin! -- literally my least favorite mechanic I think they've ever added).