Is Magic getting too technical?

[House Turtle]

With the ocean of abilities now and cards so errata ridden they don't even faintly resemble the cards they once were has the game become too technical? Stack manipulation has always been a bit over my head and now I feel like I need to lug a giant book around to make sure things work right. I also feel like I have to study for a big college exam just to handle problems that come up. I'm not trying to complain or anything I just wonder how others feel about it. The main reason I ask is I learned something interesting. Its still a royal pain to deal with and no deck I have is equipped to face it but I have an answer to Emrakul, the Aeons Torn

It seems that there are ways to target it specifically. Since it lacks haste thankfully it can only attack on your opponents turn. Now here's where the technical mumbo jumbo comes into play. Once could in theory do this right before the attack step. Use Choking Tethers to cycle it. Its activated cycling ability oddly enough does not count as it being played as a spell. It only buys you a turn but if you are doing a black/blue deck it may just buy you a turn to bust out any number of mass killing cards like Damnation, or Plague Wind

[Maraxus of Keld]

The link to Emrakul doesn't work, I think because you have the comma in there and an extra space after the last word somehow. Anyway, here is a working link if anyone neds it.

I doubt I would ever have thought of targeting Emrakul with a cycled spell, since I pretty much never use them, but I'm not surprised that it isn't considered playing a spell. Now that the subject of Emrakul is brought up though, it occurs to me that Legacy Weapon should work just fine against him too.

Anyway, to answer your original question: I do sometimes feel the same way. With as long as Magic has stuck around, it's inevitable that there would be more and more keyworded abilities (although I do believe they have keyworded a few things that did not need it). The problem really arises for me when I go 4-5 years without looking at any new cards, so when someone starts getting the new stuff there's all of a sudden 15 new abilities that I've never seen before, and another 5 that I do recognize but use a different name, like Shroud.

[Baron Sengir]

I think that's why I started to recently play in Legacy(Type 1.5) and Vintage(Type 1) tournaments and not Standard(Type 2), Modern, etc. Sure some new cards creep into decks every set like Blightsteel Colossus and Voltaic Key, but overall the decks change very little from set to set and the old cards are still better. Force of Will and Mana Drain are still the best counter spells around, the original Dual Lands can't be topped, of course the power 9, and cards like Balance, Tolarian Academy, Library of Alexandria, Bazaar of Baghdad, Time Vault, Animate Dead, etc. I know most of those cards are d**n expensive, but to me they are special too. When I drop a Library of Alexandria, I feel like I'm playing a piece of nostalgic history; like when I pop Castlevania 3 in. Blightsteel Colossus and Emrakul the Aeons Torn just don't give me that feeling.

Anyway that's my rant. In short, I agree with you and to avoid having to update my in-head card database every set I just play the older formats. It sucks the cards cost more, but thankfully most places allow proxies, and once you have the cards you don't have to update your decks after every new set like in Standard.

To add to this, I know I have casual decks that use newer cards, like my vampire deck, but more recently I slowed down on making, and using, decks like that because of what I said above and because I know those are more for tournament games and not the fun casual games we play in.