What about something like competitive Dominion? There are expansions, but the game is symmetrical. All players have the same abilities in an actual game.
Or Spirit Island at high difficulty?
Or Spirit Island at high difficulty?
Dominion is also great, and in its simplicity literally invented the deck building genre. But it, too, is too artificially complex to become immortal, even before you get into its 16+ expansions. The proliferation of the deck builder genre also makes it less likely any individual game is going to be deeply studied.
Credit to games like YINSH, anyway, that specifically try to appeal to competitive, deep, and mathematically simple foundations. They just don't have what it takes to thrive in the age of monetized bright flashing lights.
With limits on expansions and other rules, it is possible to get Dominion competitive enough to study games and optimize for turns, the original isotropic had a decent ranking and rating system (RIP and add’l shoutout for their implementation of the Innovation card game):
Whether they become "timeless classics" and get a stream of discoveries or not I think is mostly down to chance. It's more about what we let them be in our lives than their inherent qualities.
Ah, I miss the old Isotropic implementation....