$400 is about $350 more than I would have thought reasonable to spend on a card game when I was a teenager (15-16), and my parents would have thought $50 too much.

I spent about £25 on cards, and was probably given another £25 or so by a wealthy friend. The game was fine when played against others who had a similar investment, but the group stopped playing because of eBay: our friends with real money could buy what they wanted, and the rest of us could never beat them.

I think it was the first thing we did which showed who had money and who hadn't. We could take cheap plastic Warhammer figures, paint stars on them, and declare them to be powerful wizard-mages. Computer games were easily copied, it didn't matter who owned a board game. M:tG ruined the equality...

I looked into the game again about a year ago, but there were so many new rules (new abilities, new card types) -- I decided I didn't want to spend that much time on one game.

The last time I played Standard seriously was RTR/Theros and all the top decks were 1K+. I looked to buy in a few months ago, but 4 Jace's alone were over $400 (a new person would also be looking at several hundred for fetch lands). The only reason current standard is "cheap" is because everyone knows that most of the cards won't hold their value post rotation.

I think I'll be sticking with the eternal formats where cards don't lose 90% of their value in 2 years.