>>96191067
Even I would sometimes gravitate towards using a similar army multiple times. People like to play certain ways and so they would play like that often. And competitive players that just want to win will just try to win its like that with any tcg. the issue was not so much with the players as it was with the cards and the power creep.

Here are two cards. One from the 1st set and one from a later set. They are both uncommon in rarity. Even if one is not familiar with the game it is easy to see that the right creature is plainly superior to the left one. The stats are just better. it is like this for many cards in the game, rendering a large amount of earlier cards somewhat obsolete in terms of competitiveness.