While I don’t quite agree with the interpretation of the numbers here are my thoughts:
The game is dead in the sense that we won’t see more content than a maximum of 2 academy releases - and I’m starting to doubt that we will even see that.
Unfortunately the whole rule frame for this game is too clumsy to ever survive in the long run.
It’s fun and easy enough for those of us who have been around since the rerelease or a year or so in.
But very very few new players will bother learning all the rule details that this game requires to fully playable.
It’s not that it’s not worth it in the sense that you will get (IMO) the best 1vs1 game out there. But it’s so much to learn and it’s so much to memorize that doesn’t make sense.
AW has steadily or even increasingly done the same mistake over and over... releasing content that has interaction conflicts with already released cards, thus increasing complexity, without even being able to answer how the rule applies for these cases.
Back in the days a fairly standard reply would be: “I’m waiting for Bryan to get back on this one”. And we would see no update for months, sometimes for more than a year(s).
An example of this is how do you deal with Akiro’s favor (both revealed and in revealed) vs temple of the dawnbreaker temple.... it was never answered prior to release of PvsS. Yet they released the PvsS expansion with the Paladins basic ability interacting with both these cards.
There are many many more examples of rule clarifications which came months or even years later, and there are probably still unanswered conflicts of how to resolve various interactions.
With release of academy which has different wordings on the cards this has (imo) grown from a significant issue to a death threatening issue (for this game).
Sometimes I wish they could make a reboot of the whole backbone of the game so to speak without adjusting the cards
The game is simply to messy, clumksy and complex in some situations as it is.