Games

push up the price of playing Standard

This is probably what pisses me off the most. I hate Standard as a format. The only thing I hate more is Sealed. But Standard is a necessary evil that exists to bring new players into the game and put them on equal footing as people playing longer than they've been alive. The old design team understood this over 30 years ago when they split Magic into Type 1 (later renamed to Vintage) and Type 2 (Standard) after Black Lotus hit $100 on the secondary market.

Flash forward to today, and there are multiple cards in Standard commanding $75+ price tags due to increased costs of boosters and the introduction of the Mythic rarity in Shards of Alara. Now it's a $2000 format that rotates, coupled with more and more necessary bans because fuck balancing the game I guess so you end up with a format that's inaccessible to anyone who isn't playing Magic as a part-time job.

This created a feedback loop where people are moving to EDH as their main format, so WotC is designing cards for EDH, which means they have to be viable in the $5000 turn two format EDH players are in denial about, which means they're overpowered in Standard, which means more bans in Standard/Pioneer/Modern, which means more players are funneled into EDH, which means we have an infinite combo of bullshittery.

And I haven't even told you about why we need Extended to be brought back and the Reserve List should have been destroyed decades ago.