I left the game as I got older. At the end of the day it just didn’t make sense to spend what magic cost if I could only play a few hours a week. It’s easy to spend over $3600/year on M:TG if you want to play competitively and that just doesn’t make sense to me if I’m getting roughly 100 hours of play in. I could do far better things with over $30/hour for hobbies.
I've always enjoyed the limited formats. I've periodically checked back in and played in prereleases or leagues or whatnot, without ever committing to building something preconstructed.
I think I may be done, though. The power and complexity creep has gotten to me in the past few years. I can understand that cards need to be rebalanced, or that new rules get introduced over time, but the complexity of the current version of the game has gotten out of hand. The cynic in me says that the power creep is there so that people playing formats like modern will pay for new sets, and since the new cards are more powerful and have more abilities, it drags down the game.
(will try be a bit verbose here so that people who are not MTG fans will still be able to follow sorry if it's a slog to get through!)
I was in a similar boat, though for a long time during university I shared a collection with a friend and we did a pretty good job at selling off stuff to keep the effective costs down.
Since 2016, I stopped playing heavily rotational formats like Standard [for those unfamiliar, there's many different formats of MTG which are played and 'Standard' is one of the most popular ones in which you can play "all the mainline cards released from the last X sets", normally ~2 years worth], and moved to Modern [all cards printed since mid-2003 are playable]. My hope was that because of the longer (and growing) availability of cards, Modern would be more affordable in the long term - since decks would remain viable for long periods of time (perhaps with small adjustments with new cards coming out) and would retain value as a result.
Then over ~20 months, that view changed a lot. First Wizards banned Oko & Mox Opal in January 2020. Firstly, these cards lost value directly - but they also caused quite a big shift in the metagame to the point where entire decks got awful, and hence less valuable. Then in mid-2021 they released the Modern Horizons 2 set, which had a massive impact on very many Modern decks (per MTGGoldfish, 8 of the 10 most commonly played creatures in the Modern metagame at the moment are from Modern Horizons 2). Once again, this totally decimated the value of many existing cards.
I hate the sort of "MTG Finance" approach to the MTG scene, but like you say - it's hard to justify $30/hr for a hobby, and its clear that Hasbro will print whatever it takes to maximize their profits (even if it has a significant negative impact on existing customers).
There are, such as pauper. I’ve also heard of playing with a total $ limit per deck, at time of construction.
The main limiting factor is what you can convince folks to play. Game stores have the main formats, and unknown amounts of money spent, but you can do whatever with your friends!
