Xmage: An open source implementation of Magic The Gathering

You know, they were such a contribution to my childhood. I'm going to call them, along with Verisign, as the two most virtuous and natural monopolies I know. Both basically the same, have to watch over assets they can produce in limitless quantities, at a huge profit, but there's a catch, they have to make, live and die by the rules they make for those assets.

No problem spending money on cards, in fact they have to be expensive by some standard for speculation and collection to make sense. That's part of the game too. With Verisign also, the dot-com is speculative, a Veblen good too. And for both, the expense creates integrity, the fact dot-coms are expensive is closely tied to their being the primary TLD, like in Paul Graham's essays. And the integrity creates the expense.

And both Verisign and Wizards spend an inordinate amount of effort in the integrity of what they produce. In fact Wizards managed to create a legal system with much less "degenerate"[1] combos than any actual legal system, while also easier for beginners. Yeah with lower stakes, but also much lower resources compared to House of Representatives and Supreme Court, billions in lobbying, all of that.

[1] The term of art in MTG is degenerate. I think in math too, it exists. Maybe in the legal system too. I am of course not a lawyer, but you don't need to be if you're talking at a meta level, every voter can do that.