I listened to parts. Thanks for posting the discussion!
I definitely think gradual change of the meta is possible in physical card games. (I like digital as a complement, but I LOVE to touch cardboard and sit face to face) I have played both Game of Thrones LCG and Netrunner LCG by Fantasy Flight and they use a very elegant way to do this by regularly publishing a list of 'restricted' cards. In a deck you may use only one restricted card, you can still use several copies of that card but you cannot use another different restricted card in the same deck. This makes it easy to break up very efficient card combinations. One could then put for exampel Pillar of Righteous Flame + Archers or something (I'm not into the game enough to know exactly what cards are best to combo with the Pillar, just an example) on the restricted list and people would have to chose one or the other. You would preferably have a bunch of restricted cards for every Mage that is currently considered too good, and very few for the Mages that are underpowered at the time. Of course, every Mage can use every card, but you get the idea. It is a bit similar to your ban-list idea but I think it leaves more choice in the hands of the players. If you really like your Pillar or whatever, you can still use it but you might need to tweak the rest of the deck.
I think it is a very good way of doing it since you do not really change the in-game effects of the cards, you only change the way decks can be built. In FFGs case they updated these lists like every second or third moth and each time they did the meta opened up for new possiblities. I liked it a lot. Kept the game fresh even in periods where not a lot of cards were coming out.
In Mage Wars you could even take it one step further and instead say that all cards on the restricted list have their spell point cost doubled, or something like that. But the key is changes at the level of deckbuilding, not in-game, which makes playing with 'restricted' cards as easy as playing with non-restricted since the in-game printed info stays the same.
I also think one-off erratas/faqs on some cards, like what they did with wizards tower is perfectly fine. Some card are just design misstakes that need to be tweaked. Players can deal with it if they are competitive, and if they are not, they can just ignore the faq and play casual witht the cards as written.
