How do you pay to win in a sealed draft?
Trying to be competitive in Modern or Standard or even EDH requires spending at least $500+ per deck unfortunately (Vintage & Legacy even more I'm guessing). Though if you have a group of friends who play casually, it can be fun.
There was still some metagaming. Getting ahold of mythics had a greater degree of randomness, and if you had a buddy that was running a separate color deck you could effectively pool cards.
Competitive Magic is a tiny tiny fraction of the overall market. It's also totally possible and reasonable to build competitive decks on Arena with a pure F2P account, if you're into that.
There's always a genetic component that influences your min and max levels at any given skill.
You might not beat Gary Kasparov, but if you retired, hired a coach, and devoted yourself to chess, you would be better than your counterfactual equivalent who doesn't.
Pay-to-win doesn't mean you only win if you pay. It just gives you an edge if you do, and it's shitty. This is why I used to like DotA 2, to the extent that someone can like DotA 2, because all purchases were purely cosmetic and didn't affect gameplay at all.
For instance, in Modern due to a strong mana base and other expensive staples you can easily reach $500 for a midtier deck. One can argue this is “pay to play”, but there is no logical reason for these costs. It’s cardboard. Typically decade old cardboard. Wizards is playing with what is called “reprint equity” so they never make a set “too” good and “burn through” their backlog too quickly. To me its an excuse to profit off the secondary market.
Legacy is even worse, as the P2W is that at any decent level you are required to have the consistency of Dual Lands and various other strong pieces of mana to be competitive. It’s why decks typically cost a few grand on average. This is due to the Reserved List making it impossible to get such important cards via reprints.
And finally, on the extreme end you have Vintage, where the decks are primarily built around the most expensive and powerful cards in the entire game. Including the Power Nine. Decks here typically cost as much as a car regardless of level.