Comment by rcxdude
2 months ago
Basically none in practice, but there are some hybrid collector-players who like the idea of building decks from their collection as opposed from all decks, and bristle at the idea of someone else not doing that. (And of course the collectors and WoTC themselves like to push for it because it makes them money: WoTC officially pretends that the secondary market doesn't exist but their actions make no sense if they aren't crafting their ~~loot boxes~~ booster sets with the idea of rare and valuable cards driving a lot of the demand).
(I personally think that if you want to force everyone to pay for product, play sealed or draft. Then everyone's on an even playing field budget wise, and it's more interesting than just net-decking. I'm sympathetic to the fact that WoTC needs to make money, I'm not sympathetic to their approach of chasing whales and making large chunks of the game basically inaccessible by their definition of 'legitimate play')
Isn't mtg basically pay to win because of this?
Some formats, but you can always play sealed which removes the ability to bring in outside cards at all. You either get your own pool of cards or draft from a shared pool so it's more down to your skill in building a deck (or luck pulling the right card from a pack you opened or it getting passed to you because the player before you didn't need it and wasn't drafting for value).
There's cheaper strategies in most formats though that you can still get wins with, Red Aggro decks are usually pretty cheap to build and have a decent win rate. You'll rarely place highly in tournaments with it but that's true for most people and most decks.
No there's usually a wide variety of viable strategies, which have different costs associated with them. There's a price of entry but once everyone is on that level you still have to play well.
Colloquially, I think people call this 'pay to win'. If there's not one single price of entry that delineates someone playing vs not playing, i.e. if money spent results in any power level difference between players, that's pay to win, even if there's a ceiling to how much paying more than just buying a starter deck will get you.
If you're playing constructed tournaments, yeah. Depends on the format, but the price of entry can range from $$$ to $$$$$$.