The issue of power creep is one that haunts pretty much all of the best card games at some point. However, if you’ve played Magic: The Gathering for a while (and especially if your history with the game goes back a couple of years), you’ll likely be familiar with another term too: complexity creep.
In order to evolve and keep the game fresh, it’s vital that designers continually offer something mechanically new and experimental throughout the product line. Yet with that experimentation can come frustration and confusion as players attempt to come to grips with set design choices that present more like an obstacle to satisfying play than they do a contribution to it. This can manifest in a number of ways: be that an impenetrable wall of ruletext, a swathe of different counters that take far too much brain power to keep track of, or just a new keyword that’s a needless reflavoring of kicker.
That’s not to say new mechanics should be avoided entirely. As Lead Designer, Mark Rosewater notes on the MTG blog, the reception to 1999’s Mercadian Masques expansion showed that players actively complain when they feel there are no new mechanics offered by a set.
It’s just that things which are new aren't automatically good. And really, any new mechanic in a Magic: The Gathering set shouldn’t be considered a necessary addition as a matter of fact; they have to be uniquely enjoyable enough to justify their inclusion. Otherwise, wrestling with an entire vocabulary of keywords can stop being worth a player’s time. Just look at the 2019 Playtest card, Bear with Set’s Mechanic for a playful reminder from WOTC themselves: uninspired card design is an easy trap to fall into when the novelty of a mechanic is used as a crutch.
