[deeponey]

The article seems to gloss that this is one of the most potent pay to win loot-box hustles of all time, primarily targeting minors. The game is amazing but has this sleazy side. For this reason most grown-ups I know jumped to one of the living card games, Netrunner or Game of thrones.

[ubernostrum]

My usual analogy is golf.

If you show up to play a round of golf, and your opponent has a nice set of professionally-made clubs while you're using some sticks you carved by hand, you're probably going to lose, badly. But that doesn't make golf "pay to win" -- at the competitive level of golf, everybody has made the investment in that baseline of good equipment, and you're back to practice and skill as the differentiator.

Magic is similar. If you show up to a constructed tournament with whatever you could cobble together from a few booster packs, yeah, you're going to get crushed by people with competitive decks. But at the competitive level, everybody has made the baseline investment to have access to the full card pool, at which point you're back to skill (of designing/choosing/playing decks) as the differentiator.

Anyway. Top-tier Standard decks are in the couple-hundreds-of-dollars range, and even if you just go out and get the cards for one of those decks and nothing else, there's enough value in the cards that you can trade/sell and get back not 100% of what you paid in, but enough to make switching to a different deck not all that bad.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

That’s a bad analogy. If golf had specific rules about length and material of each golf club that also changed every year, requiring you to buy new clubs to match the rules, you might have a point.

[jon_richards]

Golf companies also don't sell you unknown bags of gear that may either contain something useful or a complete pile of crap.

[mcv]

Interesting idea for a new type of golf tournament: at the start, everybody gets a closed bag of random golf clubs, they pick one to keep, and pass the rest of the bag to the golfer to the left while they get to choose their next club from the bag they get from the right.

[ubernostrum]

And competitive Magic players don't buy booster packs unless they're planning to play draft. They go to a store and buy the individual cards they want.

[gpderetta]

Non rotating formats, although more expensive, are very popular, especially Modern and Commander. Outside of bans, the playable card pool is very stable and changes relatively little even with new expansions. I don't play golf, but I assume that equipment wears out and need to replaced (balls, bags if not bats).

[YokoZar]

More relevant than the equipment cost is the fees. For the price of golf club memberships you could make a lot of magic decks and enter a lot of tournaments.

[ubernostrum]

Non-rotating formats are more expensive up-front than Standard, but tend to be cheaper long-term because the cards stay legal and usually things don't shift enough to make them completely unplayable.

[hajile]

Nothing (except maybe hearthstone or force of will) compares. I'd say it only partially targets minors though. The cost is too high in constructed. Most players at a given FNM are 25+.

Standard: $500 per year (more if you have to buy into a completely different archetype)

Modern: $1200 per deck (with a revolving door on the ban list)

Legacy: $2-4000

Vintage: $15,000+ (mint power mox and lotus would cost $35k+).

[TomK32]

I wish I could find my old netrunner deck.