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The paper hasn't got anything to do with optimal game strategies, it's just showing what it is possible to achieve computationally within the rules of the game. If you're looking for advice on how to pay to win, this paper really isn't for you.

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This is not correct: the paper does have to do with optimal strategies. They even say as much in the abstract.

>In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world Magic is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a problem that has been open for a decade

This is an important distinction, as I've found that the optimal strategies in Magic are very rarely the most intricate ones or the ones involving recursive constructs. Occasionally a trivial infinite loop becomes part of a top deck, but you definitely aren't going to see someone doing the equivalent of calculating pi to win.

I think the Turing completeness is definitely still part of the appeal of Magic, because the bizarre edge cases and complexity occasionally do creep in to even serious play and add a lot of interest, but the complexity is of the iceberg variety, where most of it rarely makes itself visible most of the time.

OK that's fair enough, but it's not saying anything about what optimal strategies might actually be, just examining their potential complexity in an extreme edge case scenario.

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