Which is a shame, since the game itself is actually fun. Or it would be if you could buy the cards easily and cheaply.
tldr: fights, and watch someone buy the entire shelf at walmart in one transaction.
Also consider that most Magic cards are also valuable only because of their collector status. The valuable ones are mint first editions and nobody is buying them to play them.
So who fuels this collectors market? Nostalgic 30-something that have now disposable income and want to buy things they wanted as children. Same as with videogames collectors and such. You don't need an original copy of Supermario to play it, but people still spend thousands to buy it.
Anyway, this is why I play MTG online - same with 40k, although there's no gambling there. Just too expensive to play either IRL even if I wanted to.
There is, until there isn't. MTG has been leaning drastically into tiered and ultra-premium products. Increasingly, it feels like Magic design and product is focused on extracting money from the whales at the price of hollowing out their playerbase.
It's difficult to draw a hard line between wholesome collecting and lootbox gambling, but it's hard not to notice that even the bastions of the collectible industry have been aggressively moving in the direction of the latter.
I would guess that collecting goes beyond wholesome once finding the products comes really hard and there is very high prices and extremely low rates involved.
I think this depends on how you interact with your chosen game. To me, I play Yugioh as a hobby. If I'm "only" into the digital versions of the game, then it's no different to playing just about any other video game.
And even then, these live service TCGs (outside of unofficial simulators) can often have the same lootbox/pack gambling aspects as the real thing.
Personally that's not what I want. A good chunk of why I play paper is because of the physical community, in a space outside my home.
The thing is now people are marketing the pack opening. You have social media accounts of them pulling cards from packs and getting all hyped up about it. Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s but thats because the unboxing as an experience wasn't marketed by anyone at all. People just wanted cards they thought were personally cool in some way.
And likewise expansion of markets in the internet era means people start to have shared values of what is a valuable card based on market price vs just being interested in some certain cards out of your own interest.
How old was everyone in the 1990s? Kids loved this kind of thing in the 2000s.
That's still the move. Unless you want to gamble.
Now as an adult, I see tweens with addictions to multiple things. Watch them beg to buy a Pokemon pack, open it, and lose interest. It's completely the dopamine expectation. And it takes years in recovery. But I think I was ignorant and unaware in the 90s of what other people were addicted to.
Like most new games these days. I play only old games or few special ones like Baldur’s Gate anymore.
Previously you just hunted down the missing cards in your collection. Now we have kids worrying about whether their card will grade a 9 or a 10 and attract top dollar.
There's even a sort of gambling element to sending a card in to be graded, its relatively expensive to do and you don't really know what grade you will get back.
Now you have influencers like Logan Paul wearing a "10" graded Pokemon card on a chain etc:
> https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/logan-paul-pokemon-card-pikac...
I never understand why people "collect" these things
Their value is much less speculative and much more closely based on (blindbox price * distribution percentage of the rare variants) than most of the other items being dicussed here.
However, you can buy sealed product to both build your collection and get cards to trade. And the main reason for sealed to exist, ostensibly, is limited.
And a lot of people don't interact with the "gambling" aspect at all. I'm very deep into magic after 10 years, and I almost exclusively buy singles and do prereleases. I might buy like 10 random packs total in an entire year.
All of them also introduce rarities (arbitrary exclusiveness), hidden cards in a pack, and extreme gambling gamification.
The only non-gambling MtG packs are the preconstructed commander decks. All 100 cards are published. But the packs and boxes? Pure gambling, especially for the chase rare cards.
And before anyone asks, yes, my username is based after this $2 card. https://edhrec.com/commanders/nekusar-the-mindrazer