I could probably write a couple thousand words on it, since I've been playing the game for over 25 years and legitimately believe it is the best card game ever created, if not best game period, but it comes down to the same thing that ruins everything else: capitalism. Wizards parent company Hasbro replaced some C-level ghoul or VP of Whateverthefuck a while back, and the new guy didn't like that the line wasn't going up fast enough so that's lead to two major problems:
Printing intentionally overpowered cards at the highest rarity in order to sell packs (this has the nice bonus of ruining older formats as well).
Shitting out product to a ridiculous degree and expecting people to buy it all.
When Magic was first printed they had no idea what they were doing, but it eventually coalesced into an extremely well-balanced and thoughtfully-designed game. Banning cards was extremely rare, because they usually did a good job of balancing the sets. There were periods of competitive play that were stale because certain decks dominated the metagame, but overall you had options. Since this recent decline they've had to ban more cards in a year than they had in the previous 10 years combined. This is also after they hired former pro players to create a new internal team dedicated to game balance and made a huge deal of it (whoops....). I don't think the Play Design Team are stupid, I just think their hands are tied and they're forced to allow cards that are so obviously and ridiculously broken that they become must-have chase cards that immediately shoot up in value on the secondary market to $25+ per copy (I also 100% believe there is "insider-trading" where people in the company scoop up a bunch of copies of broken cards ahead of time, or sell them off before bans being announced).
So to go along with that, the printing schedule for Magic sets used to be pretty fixed and only 2 big sets were coming out a year. This was a nice rhythm and not an overwhelming amount to keep up with, and again ties into point 1 because it gave the designers plenty of time to fine-tune things. They recently bumped it back up to 3 sets per year, but the real problem is the supplementary stuff, I mean look at this shit. There's also another cost-related problem with card quality, foil cards have such bad warping and bending that it's a complete joke within the magic community to call them pringles.
I'd already realized how stupid it is to spend money on fucking proprietary cardboard a while ago, but all of this shit certainly sealed the decision to never give them a cent again, proxy everything and encourage everyone else to proxy rather than spend money on cards.
I could probably write a couple thousand words on it, since I've been playing the game for over 25 years and legitimately believe it is the best card game ever created, if not best game period, but it comes down to the same thing that ruins everything else: capitalism. Wizards parent company Hasbro replaced some C-level ghoul or VP of Whateverthefuck a while back, and the new guy didn't like that the line wasn't going up fast enough so that's lead to two major problems:
When Magic was first printed they had no idea what they were doing, but it eventually coalesced into an extremely well-balanced and thoughtfully-designed game. Banning cards was extremely rare, because they usually did a good job of balancing the sets. There were periods of competitive play that were stale because certain decks dominated the metagame, but overall you had options. Since this recent decline they've had to ban more cards in a year than they had in the previous 10 years combined. This is also after they hired former pro players to create a new internal team dedicated to game balance and made a huge deal of it (whoops....). I don't think the Play Design Team are stupid, I just think their hands are tied and they're forced to allow cards that are so obviously and ridiculously broken that they become must-have chase cards that immediately shoot up in value on the secondary market to $25+ per copy (I also 100% believe there is "insider-trading" where people in the company scoop up a bunch of copies of broken cards ahead of time, or sell them off before bans being announced).
So to go along with that, the printing schedule for Magic sets used to be pretty fixed and only 2 big sets were coming out a year. This was a nice rhythm and not an overwhelming amount to keep up with, and again ties into point 1 because it gave the designers plenty of time to fine-tune things. They recently bumped it back up to 3 sets per year, but the real problem is the supplementary stuff, I mean look at this shit. There's also another cost-related problem with card quality, foil cards have such bad warping and bending that it's a complete joke within the magic community to call them pringles.
I'd already realized how stupid it is to spend money on fucking proprietary cardboard a while ago, but all of this shit certainly sealed the decision to never give them a cent again, proxy everything and encourage everyone else to proxy rather than spend money on cards.
deleted by creator
Mtg is gas bro