Pleasant Kenobi has a pretty great rant (warning, language) about the availability of fetchlands, which ties into something that the Professor at Tolarian Community College has been going on about for a couple years: players need reprints.
Fetchlands are the high profile example of what players need, because the case for why they need them is very easily spelled out: They help get the mana we need to play the game.
And it leads Kenobi, and myself, to two inevitable conclusions: They either are doing this on purpose, or because they're incompetent.
Thing is: we know that they're smart and we've seen the work they do. Incompetency wouldn't hold up here.
Which leads me to believe that it's on purpose. That sucks for multiple reasons; It means that they're willing to throttle older or eternal formats in order to make money now. It means that they're happy to charge you double (or more) the price for a booster pack, if they can prey on the lottery-winner aspect of players. And it means they're willing to lie to us about their reasons for doing so, saying that it's about "playability" or somesuch nonsense, when it's really about greed. And like everything related to greed, it's short sighted and cuts off the future of the game for the now.
Because every penny I spend on singles is money I don't spend on boosters. But I'm not inclined to play lottery games, and they aren't willing to reprint cards to make such a gamble worth my time. Worse, though, every critical component that is needed to play Magic that costs more than a child can afford on an allowance is another potential player who is going to do something else.
It just sucks all around.
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