Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. H.G. Wells
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. Chief Seattle
While it can be expensive, Magic is not necessarily so. I believe it is the facts which are being disputed by timstellmach, rather than him defending the honor of the game.
The facts are that while it can be fairly inexpensive, it is not even remotely meant to be. People that say it is anything other than a money pit (a really fun money pit, mind you) should pull the wool over their own eyes.
The very collectible marketing strategy takes advantage of the covetousness of human nature. Without it, it would not have been the marketing success it is. It would just be another board/card game.
I dont begrudge WotC their fabulous success based off of Magic. Like I said, its a great game. Played it for many many years. But when people remark about how it can be cheap are missing the point that SOMEBODY paid a premium price for those cards before you got them out of the penny bin. Thats a pretty major point proponents seem to miss when describing how 'cheap' magic is.
But I wont debate that further. In the realm of magic you are one of three things:
A sheep who blindly defends magic (which is rather understandable, because when you spend that much money on a game and someone threatens the sanctity of that rather large investment, its natural to rally the guard).
A reformed sheep that woke up one day and realized exactly how much money that they were dumping into the game and said "I'm done".
Or a person who is either too intelligent to get sucked into it or has yet to be sucked into it.
Pardon me if I may sound rude now, but it's very strange - you claim you don't hate Magic because it is a marketing success, yet you explain that it is a bad game because of its... marketing strategies.
MtG can be played out-of-the-box as a very clever boardgame at the price of a (Deck Box price)x2, and you have a sort of unlimited expansions over time. While the fact that WotC are making money out of it and will continue to do so (slightly increasing the power of the cards over time and forcing the "professional" players with edition restrictions in championships) is absolutely true per se, this has nothing to do with the fun you can have playing the game with friends.
Pardon me if I may sound rude now, but it's very strange - you claim you don't hate Magic because it is a marketing success, yet you explain that it is a bad game because of its... marketing strategies.
Likewise, pardon me if I sound rude while I correct your interpretation of my post.
Me liking magic has absolutely nothing to do with its marketing success. Magic is a great game DESPITE its horrible, baby eating marketing strategy. Is that better?
Not while you're making such generalizations about the groups of people: There is certain discrepancy between the reasons you say MtG is Evil (on which reasons I completely agree with you) and (it seems) your attitude to people who defend the game.
Magic can be inexpensive not only because of the second-hand cards - this largely depends on where and how competitively you want to play, as with a great many things
I've been EVERY kind of magic player over the years - competitive, money-shredder, casual, cheapskate - EVERY Archetype
please don't you forget, that you CAN play unlimited games with a few preconstructed decks which sell for 10$ retail (I bought mine 7 pre-cons at 20€ from ebay - shipping incl. - which is WAY cheaper than RFTG or other popular card-games)
and don't forget, that you can make a great CUBE and draft years and years every week with X friends (as many people do) - and yes, most of em own CUBE worth thousands of dollars, but you can construct one (commons only) for pretty cheap (as I did)
and yes, competitive people will spend over 400$ on a playset of Jace, The Mind-Sculptor - but no-one forces you to do so!
you can play REALLY competitive drafts with a CUBE!
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