As for rares I don't think Richard Garfield ever intended to make it an expensive game. Magic is one of if not the first trading card game they didn't really know what they were getting into. They thought people might buy a handful of random cards (not 4x best card) and everyone might use different cards (whatever they had lying around). Closer to traditional kitchen magic. He never intended the game to be so expensive. And mythic rares weren't a thing for the first decade and a half.
The hate against arena isn't due to lack of polish or it not working well, it's about what it's trying to do. It's not about collecting or trading cards anymore it's about opening as many loot boxes (packs) as possible.
MTGA let you purchase specific cards, Arena does not and likely never will. That isn't an oversight, that's a conscious choice to get people to spend money on buying more digital packs. That's a big reason it gets hate.
1. First of all, you could print proxies when playing with friends to try out card.
2. You could buy individual cards from other players or your local game shop.
3. You could sell your cards.
The previous iteration (MTGA) had both 2 and 3 as part of the game. What's more, they would let you "cash out" your digital cards for physical cards.
You were not required to get cards by opening packs (which I agree is the ancestor of digital loot boxes). But Arena got rid of any way of getting cards outside of "lootboxes" because they want to get as much money out of your as possible, not because it's better for the game.
I think it's high time that the first sale doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine) be applied to digital goods.
And you can buy individual cards in arena. You can buy wildcards in the store and redeem them for any card of the corresponding rarity. They’re stupid overpriced in many cases but you can’t say it’s not possible.
I was not aware that they introduce that. I gave up on it a while ago.
But wow, those prices! So they kinda addressed the purchasing individual cards, though the trading aspect of the trading card game is still conspicuously missing.
Black lotus, mountain, channel, fireball.
And you could make a deck with 10 of each of those if you wanted according to the original rules.
1) In the original game, "balance" was meant to be achieved through the ante system, so if you loaded up your deck with good rares and managed to lose, you were risking more than your opponent was.
2) There was no competitive collectible card game scene so nobody was thinking about balance, it was just about having fun. Chaos orb was everyone's favorite card when the game first came out.
3) They didn't know that people would collect magic cards in any serious way, so they weren't thinking about resale value or getting people to buy a bunch of cards so they could have the rares. Baseball card and comic book dealers early on were completely uninterested in dealing with magic cards for quite a long while.
4) You're looking backwards with decades of experience of playing collectible card games. It was not at all immediately obvious that moxes and black lotus would be good, and people did not understand either "card-advantage" or "tempo" for many months after the game was released. The early meta was all people trying to get out big minions. It took quite a few months before people started figuring out degenerate decks, and even then, there wasn't a lot of communication between players early on unless you were on a few news groups, and not many people were. A lot of it was just word of mouth.
Yeah, to echo this point exactly: as a kid I remember that it was distinctly disappointing to open a pack and get a boring mana-related card, such as a mox or dual land, in the rare slot. We all wanted cool big creatures instead!
Pretty soon, the usefulness of those mana cards became clearer. But I still recall finding it ridiculous that moxes were selling for a steep $15 at a gaming convention.
I stopped playing a few years later and sold all my good cards. I cringe seeing how much even a lowly Arabian Nights mountain sells for these days...
The main thing that went wrong with MTG was reducing it to 1v1 primarily. MTG is a hugely different game when there are multiple simultaneous opponents.