I know this is likely an unpopular opinion, but I’ve never liked card collecting games. It’s like having gambling microtransactions in my card games. I don’t tolerate those in video games, why would I in card games? Why wouldn’t I just play Wingspan or Uno or Catan or one of the many other excellent “normal” card/board games instead?
MTG isn’t (currently) as bad as things like Pokémon with the scalping and collecting. Building tournament ready decks can cost you a lot of money but they sell tons of prebuilt regular and commander decks you can buy for ~$30-$60 and just play with your friends. This is sort of the standard for casual play with friends, which is the kind you’d be into if you’re comparing it to Uno or Catan. If you showed up to Commander Night with your buddies sporting a $500 hand built monster deck they’d turn you away at the door.
Yeah, I’ve stopped playing dark pattern games too. A loot box is a dark pattern, even if that takes the form of a randomly sealed pack of cards.
Also I’ve always hated going to a tournament to try to socialize, but the only words I get told by anyone are “turn” and “trigger,” so fuck that noise.
Turns out, when your product is a piece of cardboard anyone can print it off at home. The game itself is fun, but yeah I hate the micro transactions/gambling too. Luckily in most play groups proxies are totally welcome
The $150 cardboard is so obviously a racket. The game itself was fun, but I could only get into it by proxying a lot of cards. A sharpie is a reasonable investment.
Nowadays I have Forge on my phone for the same cost.Forge?
Card forge (https://github.com/Card-Forge/forge)
oh wow that looks like a proper rpg and everything
It’s a seemingly legal 3rd-party computer game implementation of MTG.
https://github.com/Card-Forge/forge
You end up downloading a lot of official card art, which is presumably illegal, but it’s all still available, so whatever.
I’ve never understood for the card collecting aspect. The most someone might catch me with is buying a few precons because I want to play with my friends. And even then I’ll totally make a few fakes. I’m just playing with friends so it doesn’t really matter if they’re legit imo
Is “magic the gathering” the gacha genre for the western audience?
Essentially people are convinced this or Pokemon cards will be their retirement. They’re thinking they’ll see enormous returns in 25 years like some people have. The problem is that for every person who made money on Pokemon or MTG, thousands didn’t.
The margin is the striking part. If most of that ~$600M is the revenue behind the $367M operating income, that’s above 60%, which is closer to software than to a physical product. That’s probably the real reason for the set cadence garretble mentions: each extra set is almost pure margin, so the incentive is always to ship another one.
And then there’s me, a guy who admittedly was drawn in by Final Fantasy so I could be considered a newbie scrub or whatever who is already kinda burned out on the game because there are SO MANY SETS. You can’t even enjoy collecting a set because a new one is being shoved in your face seemingly a couple of weeks after the last.
This is what killed it for me. It was fun to look at new cards and retune things every 3-6 months…not every 3-6 weeks like it is now
Honestly I have kinda switched over to Sorcery for the moment.
Since it’s newer, there aren’t tons of sets, seems like about one big set a year-ish, so you actually get some time to enjoy the product.
I mostly stopped playing a decade ago but have kept up with some stuff because I enjoy the lore and things. I’m really shocked they moved from the three set blocks/two set blocks models to the current “everything happens in one set” approach. It just feels like everything is rushed.
Go BRRR
What does that even mean?
Money printer go brrr
