Yeah. The other part of this is the amount of “Collector” products being released right now alongside of the regular stuff is becoming ridiculous. Big time Youtube people who talk about and preview sets are even having trouble keeping up with set releases and what is playable in what format, not a good thing when some of them make a living purely out of content creation. Its almost like WoTC is aiming to fight themselves for sales. Currently we are seeing around 7 to 8 main sets a year, double what it used to be and each of those on average have 5-6 products (various booster types, starter decks, commander decks etc) and in between all of those are Secret Lair alternate art sets, older format sets like Modern Masters or Jumpstart, and other such stuff, and as we noted the Worlds Beyond crossover releases. The last few years have seen nearly a set of some kind every 6 weeks or so, and most of those boast minimum of 125 or so new cards. There’s something an average of around 60 products a year right now which is nuts.
When I played heavily it was usually 4-5 main sets, and 3-4 side products, a new thing about every 2 months or so a year. and we didnt have the like 4 or 5 kinds of booster packs.
Depends on the format. If you want to pick one thing and stick with it i recommend Commander or Modern. Possibly pioneer but im less familiar with it. Standard rotates, legacy formats are too expense for casual players…
But if youre just playing kitchen table magic, you can pretty much play whatever you want as long as everyone is cool with it.
Another fun option if you feel like getting into it more for cheap is Penny Dreadful. Its an unofficial format but theres a group that updates its legality list every 3 months or so…its limited to cards that cost 10 cents or less on the used market. The official version is Pauper, which is basically no Rare or mythic rare cards, but its been muddled by reprints of rares at lower rarities and people argue over the legality of those.
Also, apolgies if im getting too deep or lose you, i love talking about magic with people and i rarely get the chance anymore.
For an actual game I’d play forever that doesn’t have an end (or an achievable one at least), it would have been Super Mario Maker, but as we’ve seen, that isn’t forever…
I’m also big on variety. So much so, in fact, that I often do playthroughs of multiple different games simultaneously. In the last week, I’ve played Celeste, The Blackwell Deception, Football Manager 2014, Super Mega Baseball 4, OOTP 24, Exiled Kingdoms, Stardew Valley, Fallout 4, Space Wreck, and Low Magic Age. I tend to read the same way, though I’ve disciplined myself to no more than 4 books at a time now.