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.
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 $$$ to $$$$$$.