can I ask, what is the appeal of Magic, to you? I ask because I just never got the appeal or why people would choose it over other games like yu-gi-oh, one piece, pokemon, etc. and I wonder if I'm missing something or if it's just not for me
there are a lot of things about magic that i like. first of all, i think that the way magic handles its rules and balancing is much better than basically all its competitors, the comprenehsive rules are excellently written and the templating / keywording / information economy is generally top-notch (this is what by comparison turns me off hugely to something like yugioh). magic deckbuilding feels hugely open, with all these pieces that interact and play together.
secondly, i like magic's aesthetics. i mean--the reason i got into magic and not another TCG to begin with was because my wife pitched me on it during the release of ONE, a set full of phyrexians--still my favourite faction in the game by far. yugioh, pokemon, etc don't have anything like these cards that first drew me in
of course, there's magic sets with aesthetics i don't think are as interesting. but when compared to something like flesh and blood, which bores me to tears to look at, magic is full of cool interesting striking images and ideas.
and this kind of ties in to my favourite thing about magic, which no tcg has replicated, which is its fully unique method of storytelling. the fact that each magic set is a cross section, a vertical slice of a whole separate world, is in my opinion the absolute best possible use of the medium for storytelling. i love playing draft and limited not just ebhcause i'm playing with fun cards, but because the commons and uncommons are telling me about a world, i am having the story of this specific place and this point in its history told to me through the game pieces. one piece, pokemon, yugioh, etc, don't have this same expansion=world model--yugioh, to my knowlege, has no setting at all, only continuity across specific sets of cards.
and then there's also mark rosewater: no other tcg has a head designer who is so passionate about sharing the design process with the public, who is so passionate about just teaching the world about game design. as well as being very elegantly and well designed, magic has thousands and thousands of words i can read explaining why specific design choices were made, what altenratives were considered, and so on, because of rosewater.
so yeah, i just think magic is an extremely well-designed game with 30 years of hsitory to its name that uses the format of the TCG expansion to tell stories masterfully in a way no other comeptitor has really mastered, and i just enjoy most of its tones and aesthetics (UB excepted) a lot more than i do those of its competitors.
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