Redbeard

First of all, kudos to such exemplary historical and economic study which really does parallel a lot of what's happening today. Its really sad to see this happening to WOTC, they were bought relatively a long time ago and there were so many years of great competitive Magic, 1999-2021 ish. What contributed to that era was the continuity of the lore and the stable releases of product, it was a harmonious frequency, and the players didn't feel the change control too much, at least I didnt as someone whose been playing MTG since the 90's. However the pandemic did little to right their ways after the Walking Dead leading up to FF, personally I don't know if we can say it was Hasbro or WOTC that were trigger happy, they both clearly enjoyed profiting while the state of the game fell into disarray. And now we have a can of worms, the lore is shot to hell and the community is kinda confused. And now we are kind of seeing what appear to be arbitrary rule changes. During this time other things became so apparent: recycling of mechanics with poorly thought out card bases(Drafting the Spiderman set was not fun at all for me, and I LOVE SPIDERMAN...I never bought a single product, no regrets) and AI art started hitting the scene and that hurt. Furthermore these cross-collaborations turned MTG into like a poser collectible brand. Boy I remember those Expedition Lands, now that was a cool way to collect magic, but not necessary, and it didnt plague the community. This pump and dump strategy I really think is going to dilute the essence of MTG. You need to be able to keep the old player base if you are planning to grow. I guess you can remove the roots of a plant and still propagate it....but that's kind of taking a gamble and you are killing something to grow something else. To me I don't think a company wants to gamble, I think they see the state of the economy, the world, and they want to make as much money before things start to fall apart. The old MTG leaned heavy into the intellectual competitiveness. The new MTG leans into Content Creators playing Canadian Highlander or Commander. These are VERY DIFFERENT things. If you are concerned about your MTG assets, keep what you like, have fun, sell the expensive stuff, and just replace hard to get cards with cool proxy's. I think we will see a crash soon, along with Pokemon (Mostly the Modern), OP has already gone through its boom and bust, its a microcosm of what will happen to the other two in a sense. That's just my two rubbles ;), sorry for the English, I can speak and read Russian but not really type. My other languages are stronger :(.