Magic: The Gathering

I want to be fair to this one because the actual gameplay, card for card, mana curve for mana curve, is some of the smartest design in the hobby. Cube drafting with friends is genuinely one of my favorite ways to spend an evening, everyone’s on equal footing, the format resets, nobody’s collection matters. That’s the version of Magic I still love.

The rest of it wore me down. I’ve got a closet bin with what has to be a mountain of hoarded cards at this point, half a dozen half-built decks, commons I bought because they were in a bundle, and at some point you have to admit you’re not going to take that pile and make anything coherent out of it. The rotating tournament block structure is the specific thing that broke me, cards you bought two years ago quietly aging out of relevance for competitive formats, which is a business model dressed up as game design and I don’t think that’s an unfair read.

Kitchen table casual play, no rotation, no format pressure, just build what you want and play against friends who aren’t chasing a meta, that’s still good, still four-star good on its own terms. But rated as the thing it’s actually sold as, a hobby you’re expected to keep buying into indefinitely, I can’t give it more than this. Two stars isn’t really about the cardboard, the cardboard’s fine, it’s about a collection habit that outlasted my patience for it, and a closet bin I keep meaning to sell off and never do.