I’ll be the first to admit that when compared to a lot of my fellow players, I haven’t really been playing Magic the Gathering very long. I got involved in the game right around the time the Scourge expansion was released, in 2003. Then came the Mirrordin block, and Kamigawa block and I was totally hooked. But somewhere between Shadowmoor and the current Zendikar block, I fell out of love with Magic.

I think part of the problem, for me anyway, was how fast the blocks were coming out. I felt like I couldn’t keep up. Magic isn’t exactly a cheap hobby, and with new card sets coming out every few months, the cost was adding up pretty quick.

Compounding this problem were the changes that started coming. There was the introduction of a slew of new named abilities, such as Cascade, Chroma, Devour, Graft, Landfall, Lifelink, Madness, Unearth, and Wither (and I’m sure I missed a few). Granted, a lot of cards had these abilities previously, but they hadn’t been named. Call me old fashioned, but I liked it better when it was just explained on the card, and not reduced to a one word ability.

But what really threw me for a loop were the Planeswalkers. For those who may not have encountered one of these before, a Planeswalker does not function as a creature, but rather as another player. They each have special abilities, and the cost to play said abilities involves adding or removing a certain number of “loyalty counters” from it. For me, the introduction of these Planeswalkers changed the game in a way I really didn’t care for. In my opinion, it fundamentally altered how the game was played by introducing a second “player”.

On top of all these changes, it seems as though cards are becoming a great deal more powerful than those from earlier blocks (i.e. Lotus Cobra, Mindbreak Trap, Ob Nixilis, The Fallen, Explorer’s Scope, Spellbreaker Behemoth, Nulltread Gargantuan, Sen Triplets, etc.). My decks from the Mirrordin and Kamigawa days used to dominate. Now they just can’t seem to keep up. My formerly awesome elf deck is getting owned over and over by these decks with ridiculously overpowered cards. It just isn’t fun getting your butt kicked that often, especially when it used to win all the time.

Some of my friends have taken up just playing with proxies. It’s not like we do tournaments or anything; we’re just playing house games. It’s their way of dealing with blocks coming out so fast, and the hobby costing so much money. They also argue that if everyone just prints their own cards, that it levels the playing field. It’s no longer about how much money you have, or how lucky you were in a draft, but how good your skill is at crafting decks. And I must admit that they have a point there.