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I can think of various possible reason, but I'm not sure about the ones I don't know about. It's making way too many things not work, but there must've been some huge, huge, huge benefit to make it like that. What passes for good ai play is trivial nonsense compared to the endless list of things it can't do at all simply because of this. What was the enormous and probably necessary tradeoff?

I'm not gonna argue anything, I just need to know what to watch out for when I tweak it so that certain things actually work. I'd be quite relieved if the reason was something like "it made the game go faster" or something, as in that case I might know how to improve the AI capabilities by a millionfold without involving work from anyone else.

A reason is that the original developers did so except for lord type of creatures and 1 or 2 creature with the haste equivalent of the time "can attack the turn it came into play" = Ball Lightning.All other creatures were set to be played after combat and that was what devs continued to do.
A 2nd very important reason is that for years devs didn't know what these values were for so they had to copy same values from the more relevant cards they could find.
After we learned what those values were for,was continued like that because it was faster and safer to follow for anyone that made scv work.
And a big + to play after combat that was considered I guess is the "rule/strategy" of mtg - play something at the very last possible time you can do so.

As I have mentioned again I have play/tested a lot of games in draft and few in duels with constructed decks by enabling all creatures that weren't set to be played before to be able to be played both before and after combat (except for creatures with morbid)and my experience was around 90% better AI choices and a lot more cards that AI could use better.IMHO that is the best way or at least something worth trying.

Thank you so much! Yes, I can relate to all those reasons and would agree with them in a vacuum. I also never payed attention to how many things actually require you to play things before combat (and especially how many build-around cards shift this rule).

You mentioning it helped me try out editing the .csv on my own and thank you for that, too. I was afraid many other things would break (and there's plenty of chance for that still, too), and I remember Korath saying that the game handles creatures in play much better after combat rather than before. So I was worried.

I'm going to experiment with this.

Ok, after a bunch of playing around with it my conclusion is the following:

There's a very large number of things that don't work right if creatures are set to only be played after combat by default. Ranges from obvious like mass haste enablers or spiritcraft triggers, to unobvious like evolve creatures to bizzare (like the fact that you'd have to enable every blue creature to be playable before combat to make Mana Drain work right).

I think that we should be testing the game with things the other way around, everything playable at least before & after combat rather than just after, with specific things flagged to be only after. Simply because, unless there's some huge system-wide concequence, it's looks easier to make more things work right that way.

@Aswan Jaguar: How did you make that mod? By hand for each creature?