Competitive Magic has a financial barrier to entry, yes, and always has. In that sense it's no different from any other hobby (and is cheaper than quite a few).

Also it's generally a very bad idea to try to build your own decks from scratch if you want to be competitive. Although things shift far more often (due to new sets and rotating formats), competitive Magic is similar to chess in that you're better off studying and mastering known-good decks, since very few people can reliably outperform the ruthlessly honed decks produced by the worldwide competitive community.

Competitive only in the sense of having interesting, non-standard games (that weren't a face roll) at nothing really higher than Friday meetups at the games shop, sorry if that wasn't clear. Anyone can fork out for the latest comp winning deck, read the overview to see how you play the cards and roll the local meetup, I was simply saying that isn't where the fun is for me.

And yes, we spent our fair share reading up and talking to other players about their meta decks, that in itself is great fun also, just of a different kind.

From what I heard, it costs a lot of money to purchase a competitive Magic deck, but the cards tend to hold their value so you can just sell them once you're done playing it.

Compare to, say, Hearthstone, where the digital cards have zero resale value, but the up front cost is substantially lower.

Kind of.

Standard is the most popular format, and has the lowest power level of the major constructed formats. Cards are only legal in standard for about 1 year. Most cards that are played in standard aren't powerful enough for Modern, Legacy, or Vintage, so once they rotate out of standard, their value drops.

Siege Rhino, for instance, lost 80% of its peak value by the time it rotated out in April.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/price/Khans+of+Tarkir/Siege+Rhin...

Modern is funny. It's non-rotating, but has a fairly aggressive ban list. No big deal if you play casually, but it's possible to drop $1-2k on a T1 deck, only to have a key card banned a year or two later, or for the meta to shift and your deck to be hated out of the format.

Legacy, Vintage, and EDH are generally more stable.

It's 2 years for standard atm

Thanks. Obviously not a format I play.

What I typically do when a new set comes out is to buy 3 to 4 "boxes" of the set (around 100 booster packs). Over the next couple of months I'll draft the set with friends or we will do casual sealed tournaments etc. (You need 24 boosters for an 8 man draft or 6 booster per person to run a sealed tournament.). There is a group of us who get together every fortnight or so to play limited like this - usually over a few beers.

By the time I've opened all the product I generally have copies of most of the set's staple rares and I can trade or sell anything I do not need.

It is a sizeable chunk of cash upfront if you specifically want to play constructed you can acquire 'singles' in pieces and build towards a deck over the season that way. I do not play standard at all. I'm a big eternal format fan (especially Legacy). Once you acquire those cards you can play with them forever.

One thing I have noticed is a lot of eternal format cards are getting thrown into supplemental sets (i.e True Name Nemesis, Shardless Agent, Council's Judgement, Containment Priest, Dack Fayden) stuff like that. Which tends to spike the price.

I've always wanted to get in to some regular in person gaming like this with friends, my circles are just a little too small and disconnected to sustain it though.

I think I might start trying to be the organizer more, it might just be that everyone is waiting to be asked :)

I've always loved trying to make competitive decks with as little money as possible though, maybe it's just me being silly.

I like to do this too