[foota]

There's an online version of MtG with pretty reasonably prices cards iirc, and you can get lots free.

Interface is amazingly complicated though, since it has to model all of MtG.

[elif]

There's 4 versions of magic online:

MtGO: old official version, you can buy and sell singles for similar costs to paper

Cockatrice: Old unofficial free version. leaves a lot of rule/effect enforcement up to players manually.

Duels: "new" official version, never implemented complete rulesets, abandoned by devs 2 years ago, leaving collectors who paid good money SOL

Arena: new official version, but with hearthstone model of only RNG card purchases, no singles or resales.

Personally, after putting close to 4 figures into MtGO, then hundreds into duels for nothing (on top of the fortune I've spent on paper), the price fatigue has ruined arena for me, and I don't give them any money.

[paulmd]

if only there was some kind of eXchange for MTG Online...

(to ruin the joke: this is where the famed bitcoin exchange MtGOX came from. It was an exchange for MTG Online that was repurposed into a bitcoin exchange... with that kind of flawless pedigree who could have ever foreseen problems coming down the road? /s)

[elif]

Indeed :) I am a mtgox asset recovery claimant. I have also bought plenty of "investment" paper magic, for instance, during zendikar, I tried to buy up a large swath of full frame foil lands.

But for real, the target demographics (nerds who want to speculate and also feel like they're doing something cool) made it the great fit it was.. especially when magic speculators themselves needed a better vehicle for peer-to-peer value exchange.

[foota]

Yeah, I think I was thinking of MtGO here.