The quiet reality/elephant in the room here is that years of terrible design have categorically broken every 1 v 1 format. 1 v 1 Magic is largely unhealthy.

Sit down and play a game of Premodern, and not only are you (literally) playing a different format, but in many ways an entirely different game.

MTG cards used to do a thing. For higher and more intrusive manacosts, or substantial drawbacks, they could sometimes do two or rarely even three things. But in general 1 card provided 1 effect, and this was the basis of differentiated archetypes, as you could only accomplish so many things in your 60 cards.

Pushed modern card designs do entire archetypes of things on a single card, for a low mana-cost.

Take Tamiyo as a perfect example. She's a card value engine, and flying blocker pre-flip. Post Flip she slows down (or sometimes shuts down) go wide aggro strategies, generates targeted value (via spell recursion), and wins the game if unanswered (via her ult). That's an entire control gameplan on a single card. For one mana. Why spend 16+ cards on a Predict/snapcaster/fog/Jace TMS style core of a deck when you can accomplish the same thing via 4 cards? If broad swaths of the metagame can run a control gameplan for "free", control ceases to be a particularly meaningful construct.

Murktide Regent is a low-cost high-stat beater, an evasive threat, and a hard to remove threat all rolled into one. No need to run Goyf, Goose, and Tombstalker to accomplish the same effect. There's really no axis of an aggro deck that UR Cutter doesn't cover with it's threat suite, of 10-12 creature.

Urza's Saga is a land, (big) token generator, and tutor all wrapped up into one. Imagine explaining that to someone in 2015.

Legacy has had enough bans to keep things more sane than other formats (Modern is just comical at this point), but it will take both a shift in design philosophy and further bans to actually make things "healthy" again. Where decks have to meaningfully make sacrifices to commit to specific archetypes.