Cecilily discusses the financialisation of Pokemon cards as an investment vehicle.
It’s one thing that makes me pause in teaching my niece how to play, I don’t want her to get caught up in the abstraction of the cards as anything other than pieces of cardboard with funny pictures of animals
wotc ruins formats by designing cards for them. they should go back to focusing on what used to be a normal standard powerlevel, and let everything else be an accident handled by the community/an organized play body that isn’t beholden to the beancounters.
It’s not even that they ruin them out of maliciousness or anything - now it’s greed, but it used to just be a sort of accident.
The whole concept of formats like EDH or pauper was basically a jailbreak or a refitting. “Hey what if we used this machine for something it wasn’t supposed? It will be janky, but it could be fun!” It’s like when people refit TTRPGs or mod video games to be in other settings. As soon as it is embraced by the machine it changes the purpose.