In the comment thread of Richard Garfield’s initial design rules for Magic: the Gathering, an insightful comment was posted that highlighted why cards such as these are more complex than appears:
[Richard] says, “focus on the beginner” — and over the decades, Wizards has sat down with actual beginners and watched them play. “Too much board complexity” is a problem because beginners get overwhelmed, walk into “on board tricks”, and generally feel awful about themselves. It’s a lesson that can’t be learned by playing with math grad students (who don’t have a problem computing the utility of a dozen possible Prodigal Sorcerer targets), only playing with the genuine beginners that Garfield writes about as the most important target audience.
tl;dr healers/pingers are “easy to understand, hard to actually play with” (which make beginners miserable), rather than “easy to understand, hard to master” (the ideal). If Garfield had the data Wizards has collected now, he’d get rid of pingers/healers too.
The “on board trick” aspect is that, if I control a Sorcerer, your 3/3 effectively can’t block my 2/4 — that block has some, small strategic merit in corner cases (say you have a 5/1 haste), but for the most part, it’s an unforced error. And an unforced error that was right in front of you, if only you weren’t too stupid to see it!
Everyone has finite mental processing power. For new players, that power gets tied up remembering the basic gameplay rules of combat (if I don’t block, I lose life; if I do block, I need to check power and toughness…), and there’s barely room for strategic thinking — let alone higher-order strategic thinking like, “When will my opponent want to use the Sorcerer?”
As for complexity – adding a healer or pinger to combat adds an additional combinatoric layer of complexity to combat. On a clogged board, the choice of attacks is very difficult; what if my opponent double blocks here? Or just takes it to the face and “cracks back”, since I tapped my guys to attack?
Healers make combat especially nightmarish, because that extra toughness can go anywhere, and after you assign the order of blockers.
Pingers cause a slightly different problem, where it’s very easy to invent “rules of thumb” that are completely wrong. Like, “don’t play 1-toughness creatures” — even if you need to preserve your life total by offering bait, or can play multiple guys in one turn to “overwhelm” the sorcerer momentarily.
Check out the full comment thread here.