I've wanted to get into trading card games for my entire life. When I was a kid I collected Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and in college I bought a big box of Magic cards on Ebay, but I've never played a single round of any of these games because the culture is absolute horseshit. Every single TCG company treats their customers like animals, disgusting pigs who will eat whatever slop they feed them for whatever price. The games are largely deterministic, with one viable deck, one winning strategy that everyone uses and if you try anything else you automatically lose on turn two because there's only one possible defense. And don't get me started on the fucking speculators! Some scalper will buy every booster box from every store in their zip code and get away with highway robbery on the secondary market; the best cards are ridiculously expensive, so the already deterministic games become pay-to-win, and the companies encourage this because it's all profit for them.
There are no players anymore, just consumers; either they're NFT tech bros trying to go to the moon before someone gets stuck holding the bag, or they're begrudging fanboys who are addicted to continuing the cycle despite being shit on by everyone above them, "I loved playing MTG as a kid, I need to keep giving WOTC more money, you don't understand, it's fine, I'm fine..." They never give up, they never move on, they never stop feeding the machine that exists first and foremost to exploit them; the quality of the games are not a priority for any of the executives in charge, and the consumers just keep eating their slop like it's a thing to do. Every reviewer I watch (not just for trading cards but for movies and video games too) has the exact same sentiment, "I hate this thing, but I'm gonna keep paying for it so I can complain about it online." It's never gonna get better because they keep encouraging the worst aspects of the industry.
The only people who seem to genuinely enjoy playing the games anymore are literal children who aren't involved in the culture, who don't optimize every aspect with machine-like precision. I've never enjoyed min-maxing shit because it feels like homework, so I can't get into any of the games that require you to memorize how every card in this set synergizes with every other card to exploit loopholes and feedback loops. Is that fun? Is that supposed to be fun?
Fun is a commodity, and companies will never stop squeezing money out of it.
Then again, maybe I'm just a filthy casual.
