No? Unless it is played in an Eternal format the value of a card tanks the moment it leaves standard. Magic the Gathering is a game, not Rudy's fucking retirement fund.
The vast majority of players are eternal players seeing as Vintage, Legacy, Modern, Historic, Commander, and so forth are eternal formats and Standard is the only rotating format now that Extended is gone. So yes, cards lose value when they rotate out of standard but many of them regain value or retain value if they were drawing it from other sources, additionally cards that aren't played but seen as collectors items still retain a premium, it just takes time for them to get there.
In either case I like that it's a game, a collecting hobby, a potential investment vehicle (even if only as a fringe option to go alongside traditional ones when you have those set up), and art.
MUH LGS is kind of a stupid ass Meme, especially after the past decade of WOTC specifically telling LGS's to go fuck themselves. Shit I don't even have an LGS, my pod plays in a local pizza place that is very happy to have 4 customers come in and order 2 Pizzas every Saturday at Noon.
Wizards has fucked over game stores for a while now, but here's the thing, Wizards doesn't make money off of the secondary market outside of secret lairs and Masters sets and even then it's still a fixed value. As for your situation, well grats, you and your playgroup can play with whatever proxies or house rules you wish at the pizza place and no one can stop you as it's not a sanctioned event, so the problem solves itself really.
I am not sure we would be considered Casual given the actual power level of our decks, and it does create problems when you take those decks out of the playgroup, once the full Triome set has come out I am actually going to switch the Snow Duals I keep into Shocks and have the MODO Duals on paper in the sleeves for when I use the deck outside of the group I can just say they are shocks.
I view casual as more of a setting than a power level thing, though you're not wrong either as it can apply to power level. I'd consider myself casual when playing a tier 1 deck against friends for fun for example, as I'm not really testing or playing for a prize, so even though we may be playing full powered decks the play tends to be much more relaxed and much greater risks are taken, even sometimes fringe/pet cards are slotted in to play with them but they'd still be something you'd see in a competitive environment.
As for groups outside of the one playgroup, well you can always discuss it with them, though where do you meet these groups if you're at a pizza place normally?
That is because WOTC can't even get a professional scene handled correctly much less actually managing formats.
Agreed, Wizards are shit at their job. It's amazing they haven't figured out a good way to get people to explore more formats outside of Standard as the jump from Standard to Historic (or is it called Pioneer?) or Modern is massive and Extended used to have similar issues in both the large format and then the double Standard format it became.
The Mana system is the reason Magic is better than shit like Yugioh and Hearthstone.
Also agree, but I do think it's something that can too easily lead to many non games. I definitely like a more complex resource system like Magic has than Yugioh or Hearthstone but I think other games had interesting solutions to it as well such as WoW TCG.
You can play an inferior deck in Standard and be fine, I saw Twits with Lifegain decks all the time on Arena..and I had high Mythic with a Pet Dimir Build in Historic before they ruined the format by dumping a bunch of shit into it with the Strixhaven Archive cards,
shit even in Modern you can play a pet deck and get a 5 - 0
No, I have no fucking clue how this deck went 5-0 either, holy shit 17 Lands and 2 of them are dead on turn 1
That's just Legacy Elves in Modern, it's not that bad as you only need 1 land to function usually. Not having Birchlore or Symbiote must be a huge pain though, but they seem to just be running a bunch of Lawn Elves to compensate.
However, this is where I probably did a really bad job of explaining what I meant as I've played a lot of janky decks myself to many reasonable finishes. What I meant wasn't just the tier 1 versus tier 3 deck, but the actual cards in a deck, as it seems like for a long time in Yu-Gi-Oh people would just run the same deck but a player might knowingly have a worse version. Such as they might both be on beatdown and one is running Djinn which has 1800 attack and the other Mechanical Chaser which is 1850, the difference was essentially one person running Savannah Lions and the other running Isamaru but Isamaru was a 2/3 with trample. The main reason was that Chaser was worth several hundred dollars back in 2002 or whatever so people just accepted they would lose some games against it but be well enough otherwise as a 2/3 or a 2/1 didn't matter against say a creatureless deck.
The reason this is important is because there's a view that you can't really compete if you run shocks over duals, and it's true to an extent as taking an extra 6 on top of Fetches and other things is a real downside to them that's very hard to overcome in many cases, but it's amazing that there's basically no desire to try and attempt builds with them to compete.
Agreed on Arena though and it's a clusterfuck.
Well, sideboards make things complicated and there are a few moving parts to Magic, people forget that certain decks exists because they are easy to hate out (Like Dredge) and don't see them so they remove the Hate Pieces from their sideboards...and then that deck shows up and kicks everyone in the ball sack.
Other games do have a sideboard as well, and I think the biggest mistake is moving away from it like Hearthstone or Arena has. The Sideboard is a very valuable tool and according to what I think was the second place finish at first Yugioh PT/Worlds he said he lost because he didn't really have much thought in his sideboard and that was all the way back around 2002. I'm not bringing up Yugioh because I think it's some amazing game, just because it's a reference point I'm a little familiar now that competes with Magic.
I will give Wizards some credit though, looking at the Standard decks that are placing now, there are a lot of cards being played that aren't 4 of's which means there's a good amount of ability to customize your game plan and build, and that's always good. Obviously there will be some decks that are just running a bunch of sets and not much else, but that's fine too as long as you have the mix as well.
