I made an account to reply to this (but who cares, right? this is the interweb).
There's this format called 'Old School'. People who resent magic play it (ha!).
It exists because players
reject 'modern' Magic, and have their own idea of what Magic is. They want to play the game they (perhaps incorrectly) remember.
They don't hate Magic, they hate what it's become (and it's all in their mind I think).
I think you're completely correct in your assessment: Magic is whoring itself to other Intellectual Properties in the (rather well founded) hope it moves a few more booster packs over the virtual-counter (ur LGS, whaddat?).
You watch: Wizerds will stoppit when the tweets blow the another way; they are exceedingly adept at monetising the zeit. I have little doubt it is the role of employed individuals at wiz to chart the change. They'll pick something else to do, something else to exploit fur lootz.
"Nobody cares". That's what is etched over the doors of bros Hasbro in arched text (add copyright and trademark to mentions, as their lawyers prefer).
"Sell more boosters" is written under that in lovely flowing gold-cursive.
Cardboard-crack whore to cardboard-crack whore: just play the cards you love. After more than 25 years of Rosewater fking it up: employing tournament-grinder burnouts to make card sets (hastag-omg turns out it's all about kitchen table: the format that dominates the market), and now it's unimaginative rebakes of baloney that create twitter-guano (actual #omg some fictitious Negan character is a pretend-rapist and a 'good' card #tweet-meltdown). You know what you want. Rosewater doesn't: he's can't see the game without eyes of a grinder. He thinks he's making a game. He's just lived his life in the shadow of someone who had a good idea and got really lucky.
But still buy the power-creeped cards you need. When you stop playing, keep doing this.
When you accept power-creep, you can move on.
The cards you love aren't good anymore, move on, buy the modern crap-remakes and move on.
And at its heart, it is a great game. Your memories with your friends don't come out of boosters, they come from whatever mundane plays they made 2am some Saturday night.
Turns out Rosewater can't break that: as hard as he tries with "comprehensive rules" (his historic retelling of how magic should be: it's really just a framework for tourney grinders. Adults can sort out conflicts themselves, so it goes).
The worst thing that can happen in a game is that you play irrelevant cards. This makes for boring play for others and is boring for you: cards you play not mattering means you don't matter in that game.
When the cards you love are irrelevant, it is easy to hate the modern game.
And when the cards that could change the game from your era are banned, it's like the modern game hates you.
Garfield created something long ago, some so genuinely addictive and fun.
Magic could have been like chess: seemingly immutable (yes, I know chess changed), but the same cards (reprint Unlimited/Arabians/Antiquities/Legends/Dark forever!), and many kinds of fun forever.
But it's not. It's not Monopoly.
The pressure Rosewater and his cronies is under from their upper management, so they remain employed (because they need/want a paycheck too) is why we're subjected to this crap. It's an entirely human problem. It's meant to force creativity: but it doesn't. They take the low-hanging fruit of whatever zeit thinks is cool: it's the easiest way to hashtag up profits for the upper management ppl who have no concern for the customer's passions.
The story of magic is the story of management-bewilderment transmogrified into management-hubris.
Definitely take a break. I think most people do. By '96 the game I loved from '94 was dead. Kitchen table was dead. I left the game until 2014, when kitchen table had a different life in the popularating el-comdante.
Meditate on the elements of the game you love while you break, return to those, when you are ready and when you can find them. Magic won't die.
Most of all, do your bit to grow the best bits of tour playgroup: put pressure on it sometimes, and lead from the front other times (Winter is coming, AL-ICE format anyone?).
Know when you're beat. The thing with FOMO: there's always another better thing to replace the thing that you FOMO-on in two years ago. Power-creep makes that a surety.
Even lotus: they remade that, in a format that didn't need it, after 25 years of it demonstrating it is antithetical to creativity (the source of mtg:fun).
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