>>43901856
Play pauper, stop following the "meta", dont play magic.

Obviously this is bait, but the real answer is because of drafting.

"Bad" cards are created with drafting in mind. All those vanilla creatures, inefficient removal cards, over costed bombs are all created with draft in mind. Drafting wouldn't be possible if the only cards that got printed were Baneslayer Angels and Goyfs.

And honestly, the best test of skill in magic and probably the most fun I've ever had playing, was from Limited formats, either prerelease's or drafting. It actually tests your ability to play and how well you understand all areas of the game (like deck building), instead of testing the size of your wallet and how well you can net deck.

>>43902043
It's not just drafting, they do need to pad out packs to create card value

WotC has long had the mentality that they should reward players who are willing to sit down and plan, and punish players who aren't willing to study the system seriously.
See especially: 3.5E

>>43902043
I agree. Drafting is more fun and challenging and rewarding than standard.
but even in limited there are some cards that are straight up bad and aren't even viable in draft. Green is mostly unplayable in limited for some reason BFZ

so why even print these cards? WHy not make better versions of them instead?

>>43902182
Because Magic is a TCG, so it has both terrible and good cards so people still open packs in search of those good cards

>>43902182
>so why even print these cards? WHy not make better versions of them instead?

the point of gambling is that there is a risk of losing

yes if you havent figured it out, random booster pack centric card games are gambles.

Primary answer: Because they're greedy fucks.
Excuse: Because drafting would take too damn long if you were presented with too many decisions and each of those decisions would be less meaningful.

>>43901856
Because it "wastes design space" and they are cowards. When they make most deck archetypes viable they run their head into a wall for what they can do in the next set. When this happens they have to come up with new ideas. New ideas are "problematic." Since they radically change the game and can lead to "mistakes."

Its why all the good ideas are nerfed to uselessness and the only good things are just variations of what has already been tested. By making just a few good cards and archtypes a set they can slow down this process significantly and hope that with time we will forget old ability's and think old ideas are new.

Because it's a tcg. It's gambling and forces you to buy tons of packs to find good shit. Want a balanced card game? Get real cards or buy a card game that isn't a tcg so there's no incentive to gamble and waste money.

>>43902447
>>43902361

Gambling is a balancing act though. There has to be enough incentive to take the risk. If there are so few good cards and its way more likely you wont be happy then people wont buy packs. The will just buy singles. My store only buy one box a set to sell packs from since no one buys packs any more. Everyone just buys singles since you can only take so many prism arrays before you look at it and realized you could have just bought the one good card of the set 4 times.

At least half the packs you buy have to have something worthwhile in them or people just lose interest in the packs.

>>43902527
There's also the fact that you will never pull a foil from a pack because stores sift them out.

In guild wars the professions are mostly balanced. It's a matter of personal skill rather than luck. Why cant magic be more like that?

>>43902579
Box mapping is a thing.

>>43902527
thats why they appeal to casuals with things like "oooh eldrazi!" and "oooh EDH commanders!"

casuals is probably the only reason they revived slivers since casuals think slivers are some type of meta monster

>>43902605
Pretty much all card games have an element of luck

>>43902616
>EDH commanders

But they haven't printed any in fucking forever. Not even their commander products can make interesting commanders.

This is because EDH is not standard its power level is WAY fucking higher.

>>43902579
Is this actually true?

Real life card games are so last decade. There's a bunch of stuff you can do online that you can't in real life, there are no rule misunderstandings online, online has barely any incentive to make junk cards, and shuffling isn't a pain in the dick online.

Even if we ignore those factors, there are things Magic is unable to do because it's too old with too much foundation that even other physical card games could do.

>>43902708
Very easy to do wile a scale. Foil cards weigh more.

>>43902729
that explains a lot.
i usually buy packs 3 for 10 at my shop maybe twice a week and very seldom get foils

>>43902714
It's the WoW issue, where other card games have to compete against a huge playerbase and massive amounts of content

>>43902785
>massive amounts of content

I would say no since wotc seems to want people to forget every once of content they make after its 2 years old.

>>43902847
It's still stuff being released on a regular basis

>>43902708
Nah, tried it before with one of those micro scale and busting open a booster box. It was at AVR i think.
The weight of foil packs are all over the place and the heaviest pack out of the box contains no foil.

>>43902043
thats a crock of shit, they could just reprint old staple cards or make functionally identical cards, the sole reason they exist is to pad out packs so that you have to buy more. all tcgs do this but WotC is the biggest offender when doing this, they also have the balls to given that half assed excuse, because the community is willing to defend anything they do

>>43903079
Just buy singles if it bothers you that much. You're not really "meant" to buy booster boxes unless you're drafting.

>>43902043
Cube is an amazing draft format and has all powerful cards. It even makes drafting much more skillful since you arent just picking the obvious best pick in a pack