Then I think your best bet is to use as many “whole” ingredients as possible to keep the integrity of the meat and not muddy your flavors too much. Start with a high-quality sweet and smoky dark chili powder and/or some nice dried whole chilis such as poblanos which hardly have any heat, or some other mild dried chilis. A good paprika doesn’t hurt. Whole peeled, hand-crushed tomatoes or at least hand-diced if you’re going the tomato route, large whole cloves of garlic, any herbs you use (in chili I wouldn’t go crazy, and thyme is my absolute favorite herb for venison) keep them bundled, and onions or whatever other veg (I like celery a lot for some reason, but only a couple of stalks) I tend to keep diced but not super finely, just chunky enough to chew but fit on the same spoonful as other ingredients. Remove herb stalks, pepper stems, etc after they’ve cooked down, and blend up any large hunks of tomato/peppers and garlic if you’re feeling like a mad scientist then toss them back in and let it groove.
Beans (if you’re using them) would be the only exception to my fresh-is-best policy on ground-meat chili, as I’m just too damn lazy to do the dried bean thing. I like red kidney beans or black beans and I drain them well ahead of time; bean juice is nasty to me.
Thin it out with beer (my favorite), red wine (my mom’s recipe), or beef/venison broth, and thicken it up with corn starch (a little at a time).
That’s all I got. Good chili is more like a good jazz tune than a classical concerto, full of riffed nuance and improvised noodling that can always be replicated but never quite duplicated.