is carlsen a more tactical or strategic player

what do you guys think

Depends on the position.

Great players almost always play the position as it is required of them, regardless of what is called for from a theory stand point. Some players like Tal, figure out their opponents and "play" them, quite often for a fool, inspite of the position.

I have been discovering recently, you can't usually play a positional move, when a tactical move is required. Sometimes you can, but often the resulting loss of force moves or a tempo, can allow your opponent to escape. This works in reverse also.

You may love tactics, but you can't invent a tactic, when your opponent has created a position, in which there aren't any potential tactics for you to execute, due to the prophylaxis of your opponent. Petrosian was reknowned for doing this to his opponents. Sometimes, you simply have to improve your position first, before you can execute any tactics.

This what really good positional players do. They begin to stretch your defenses and take away the coordination of your potential attack. Then they start trying to accumulate a few small advantages that can't be defended any longer, thus giving way to the potential for tactical play, but only in their favor.

Yeah it's amazing how general he sometimes sounds.

In all fairness to Carlsen, maybe he doesn't need to justify his intuition, or his certainty, with a long line of moves so that you trust his judgement. He might even do this intentionally to not give his opponents any more insite into his thought process and perhaps to try to get them to think he is just playing by the seat of his pants, when in all reality, he is in complete control and knows exactly what he is doing.

The same could be said of Capablanca who was terrible at explaining his own games.  Like Carlsen, Capablanca was an intutive player.  It could be a matter of left side of the brain vs right side.  It is interesting that Chigorin felt his weakness was positional play, but made far fewer positional mistakes than tactical.  Chigorin seemed to have a intuitive knowledge about good and bad bishops even if his conscious mind didn't know anything about it.  It could be that Carlsen's sense of position is beyond what anybody knows, but he is at the stage where he is just groping to understand it himself.

It stands to reason if you have the most brilliant chess mind on the planet, it isn't like you can open up a book from a prior champion and have it make you make sense suddenly.