>>149533443
As someone who first played MTG when Mirrodin released in middle School, old MTG (As in the first 3 years) was fucking bad.
>Cards are either undercosted with amazing effects (Demonic Tutor, Time Walk, Channel) or overcosted with ass effects (Wood Elementall, all those vanilla Legends that cost like 6+ mana for a 5/3 vanilla creature)
>No card limit at release so the best deck was 20 mountains and 40 lightning bolts
>Block formatting wasn't a thing yet so sets weren't really designed with cards from other sets in mind
>Early card design didn't really explore multicolor cards that much (This wouldn't really happen until Invasion block)
>Asides from the ones that are still Evergreen today like Flying and First Strike, Early keywords are for the most part complete ass (Cumulative Upkeep, Banding, Rampage)
>From what I've read the majority of games were just complete grindfests due to the lack of efficient creatures (aside from the likes of Shivan Dragon/Serra Angel/etc)
A lot of these can be written off as them trying to figure out the ropes since it's the early days of the first card game ever and they just threw shit at the wall to see what worked. The only real strength early Magic had was that creatures weren't the de-facto way to win the game with a better balance between aggro/combo/control playstyles.

And yeah I agree with you that UB fucking sucks and half of Standard each year being UB sets is the next step towards MTG's long-term death/Fortnitefication, but to think that the first 3 years of Magic were "The best years" is fucking insane when the next 30+ years have
>Mirage Block (The first time Magic was truly "good")
>The sweetspot of Onslaught/8th/Mirrodin Standard (Fuck you I have nostalgia for it)
>Peak MTG in the 5 year span of Scars of Mirrodin > Innistrad > RtR > Theros > Khans of Tarkir
>Actually good settings that aren't Dominaria
Though I will concede shit's been pretty sour for Standard/Modern ever since FIRE became a thing.