I see a lot of people making the same claims about Type 1 and Type 2, switching their rationales around to fit--Type 1 is 'more skillful' because it has more cards, Type 2 is 'more skillful' because the cards change more, etc.

It's certainly true that in Type 1, there is a larger total card pool which makes for more possible interactions.  But is a pilot of a Type 1 deck really concerned with ALL those cards?  Most likely not; he knows what he should be looking out for, in a general sense, from deck X or Y.  This is largely in part thanks to the Internet, free distributor of information.  And, not too surprisingly, this is very much the same in the Type 2 environment; you have dominant decks that people talk about (Fires, from the past, Rebels, Wake, Psychatog, etc.) and you have the people who try to build decks that beat -those- decks.

But I don't think Ben Bleiweiss was addressing the issue of deckbuilding.  He was in fact talking about -play- skills, and those differ largely from deck -building- skills.  To say that Type 1 inherently contains more 'complex' situations than Type 2 is an outright lie, borne of ignorance--I don't think that, say, every deck in Type 1 has more complexity than, say, a Goblin Bidding deck that's trying to combo you out.  That requires an intricate knowledge of the stack.  And of course there are decks in Type 1 that require just as intricate planning and execution.

And here I must agree--I would say that the average Type 2 player has a better basic understanding of the game than the average Type 1 player.  Type 1 players have (often) several disadvantages--either their cards may not do what they read on the card (as mentioned before) or they struggle with having old rules in their heads (something I've run into several times personally), or this or that.  I found (when I was still able to convieniently play Magic) that the Type 2 players just understood the flow of the game better--and that's something that I think carries over to Type 1, rather than the other way around.

I don't say this as a rabid Type 2 player, either--I actually haven't been in the game competitively since the rotation, I simply don't have the money to get back in and get a good working deck together.[/u]