The more I try to think about card games, the more I feel like the problems of combo decks and card economy are unsolvable. It seems impossible to think up a system that's fundamentally interactive that doesn't devolve into a war of attrition (when it should, at the very least, be a gamble.) Your card game will eventually devolve into rote-learned 90% Solitaire with a handful of instances of interaction which are pretty much gambles or pure control where all your cool cards essentially boil down to a singular gamble that they can't negate your negate of their negate or whatever and that your action won't somehow lead to them making an unbreakable board. When I describe them like this, they sound very similar. Because they kind of are. The end result is a game with very few meaningful choices. What's worse is that these types of decks often coexist in trading card games and they produce matches which neither side enjoys. And although they can coexist, there is basically no middleground. No middleground that is meta, stays meta, and is how the game is played by pros or even the majority of players for the majority of the game's lifespan. No, the middleground is not a deck that can pivot between combo and control; both essentially can and do even when played purely. The true middleground of interactivity (that isn't just hinging on a +1 negation making the game unwinnable) seems like it's impossible to enforce as "the game" unlike just leaning completely into combo or control. Part of that is powercreep, the other part is "Well, how?" which is usually just combos and controls being weak and incomplete (which circles right back to powercreep.) I'm trying but I don't know if my solutions are enough.
I know I'm speaking very generally. I don't really know Magic The Gathering or really, Yu-Gi-Oh! This is just how I feel. You can call me an idiot for feeling so strongly about a topic I objectively don't know much about like you can always do but I suspect no one cares about the topic enough to do so.