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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • 20 years ago, I might have agreed (even if naively). Today, MTG has just turned into a cashgrab. The original game bought and bought again through acquisitions, and rare/mythic rare cards becoming the staple for competitive play driving constructed deck costs into the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars. Between this and the attempted reversal of their sibling D&D’s licensing structure (particularly for content creators), I just have no more interest in participating in collecting or playing MTG. I’m nostalgic for the days we used to have big multiway matches (even predating EDH/commander) in between rounds of chess tournaments, or at the school lunch tables, but those days are never coming back. Everything about their design structure now is about extracting maximum profit from their playerbase. Arena offers one of the best CCG game clients one could ask for, but again, the design takes all the P2W gimmicks perfected over the last 2 decades: the gacha, the battle pass, the daily rewards the demand you return to play imbalanced matches again and again and again, essentially becoming the content, the dopamine hit for someone else that paid to win.


  • I honestly think it’s unlikely. Not because Lemmy is bad or that the tech couldn’t handle it. But Lemmy isn’t really profit driven - there’s no way to really build a moat without defederating, and therefore no capitalist reason to advertise and grow a server - all that would do is increase infrastructure burden and then leave the server owner trying to figure out how to recoup the cost. And if they start running ads, charging fees or running people nuts with merchandizing, that growth they paid for is likely to scatter to other servers offering the same access to content.

    So if growing tall isn’t likely, what about growing wide? Well, maybe. I’m still extremely new to Lemmy World, but from what I can tell to run a Lemmy instance you have to have or be willing to learn a basic understanding of Linux, and be willing to charitably donate your hardware/bandwidth to the public. That might work out, or that might be constrained either by freeloaders scaling faster than donors, or the learning curve proving too much a barrier to entry. Wikipedia worked out, but it still has to occasionally prod its users to remind them it needs money to keep afloat.