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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

> It was a card game where, if you had enough money, you could effectively buy all the aces.

Wait, "was"? I stopped playing years ago when I realized the money I needed to stop losing was an order of magnitude higher than the money I had.

How much would I have to invest today in order to have a 50/50 chance of winning against a random opponent?

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In which environment?

Many years ago, Wizards of the Coast realized that the game was unapproachable when all the cards are legal. So they created supported formats, and people just agree on which one to use before they play. For instance, we could play a deck where all cards have been printed in the last couple of years (the standard format), or we could play only with common cards, but from any expansion ever (pauper). The formats where you can play with pretty much every card ever printed are not those most, if anyone, play.

Owning four copies of the cards in Standard is pretty expensive: A refresh is about a grand a year. But even pro players don't do that. People aim for having a couple of decks per format, Which is a lot cheaper, especially if you trade your unused cards.

To play for cheap, people play draft. 8 people, 3 boosters per player ($15 or so), and you can have a little tournament for a few hours. And enough drafting will get you cards that you could save to use for standard decks.

It's still a pretty expensive hobby, but it's not like you need to buy the $1000 cards to play.

A similar story appeared a month or so ago. People recommend playing "draft" to avoid the money-sink.

The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9192628

The subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9194357

(The Dominion recommendation is good!)

The limited formats (draft and sealed) remove the issue that your opponents' cards might just be better than your cards, but they make the cost problem much worse. It's several times more expensive to play limited (where you have to buy new product every time you want to play) than to play constructed, where you're allowed to reuse the cards you own.

Draft is O(N) and constructed is O(1), but the constant factors matter. You can draft once-a-week for a year and spend less than you would on a constructed deck. Better still you can cube draft (i.e. reuse the cards).

If a draft costs around $13, drafting once a week for a year is more expensive than almost any constructed deck. For $700 you could have two competitive decks, or do quite a lot of maintenance on one. Drafting only feels cheaper because it's spread out.

Looking purely at costs, the obviously correct thing to do is proxy your cards. Proxies are free.

If your net expense of drafting is $13/week then you're either getting ripped off or losing every game and going out of your way to avoid picking any valuable cards. It's been a few years since I last played, but when I did draft weekly I averaged well over $5 of cards per draft without explicitly money-drafting anything that didn't pay for the draft by itself. The median draft leaves you with a few $1 rares, but there's enough high outliers to pull the mean up quite a bit.

It's pretty dishonest to discount the cost of drafting because you get some high-value cards while refusing to discount the cost of constructed... the entire cost of constructed is obtaining high-value cards. If you buy a $400 deck, do $200 of maintenance on it over one year, and then sell your cards at a 50% loss, you're still way ahead of a drafter who averaged $6 of money cards per week. And on top of all that, you had the option of playing more than once a week if you wanted to, and you never deliberately sabotaged yourself in the attempt to cut costs on your hobby ("explicitly money-drafting anything that [paid] for the draft").

I might also note that on Magic Online, it's definitely not true that the median draft leaves you with a few $1 rares, as the residual value that bad rares used to have has been cannibalized by mythic rares. A bad rare in MTGO can be purchased for $0.10; obviously you can sell it for less than that. Are paper rares that much more valuable?

What's a random opponent? If you mean "choose one opponent from among everyone who currently plays M:tG with equal probability", ten bucks will get you a better than 50/50 chance. A lot of young children play without even knowing some important rules.

If you want a 50/50 chance against a random opponent at the pro tour, you probably couldn't get that just by investing in cards (although, if you get to know their deck in advance, you might do that well or better).

If you want a deck that people wouldn't laugh at you for playing in the pro tour, probably three to five hundred dollars. Red decks are often much cheaper than other decks.

You could always play booster or sealed deck drafts. They cost $10-15 each (for booster drafts) and you get nearly that value in cards, plus more if you place in the top 2 or 3. Your chance of winning against an opponent is entirely based on a combination of luck, your drafting skills, and your playing skills. Money put into the game is not a factor.

I recently played a few booster drafts and one a few of my matches, even though I hadn't played in about 10 years.

Besides drafting, EDH is a good format if you don't want to spend too much. When you have a 100 card deck with only unique cards (except for basic lands), people generally don't want to spend $10 on any single card.

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