Magic: The Gathering - Page 268

Well practicing and actually winning just as time consuming (not necessarily time "rewarding") as card speculation. I am pretty conservative when it comes to speculation compared to some of my friends, namely I go for cards that I think will be good across many (eternal) formats and foils for EDH. I haven't made out like a bandit and am more or less even after starting "fresh" 2 years ago. Really no extra effort since I don't even go out of my way to trade at any major events that I travel to. There's a pretty consistent pattern to blue chip magic cards that is fairly low risk. I am not saying to pull a Kibler and go hoard Daybreak Rangers like food during a zombie apocalypse. Finally, there's some overlap so it's not like two mutally exclusive concepts that you need to devote your full attention to; even a little attention should help cover/reduce some of the costs of playing cardboard with paint on it (should/when the game tilts you enough to be bitter about it). Just a simple buy-low when you can, even if you can't sell-high. Like Innistrad lands were like below 10 bucks for so long, now they're like what? 10-15? Same happened with the Scars lands. You need those lands anyways unless you were dead set on playing a deck and will stand by the deck, but then you are handicapped in playing the deck if the meta shifts and are stuck buying high(er) for the next deck that you'll play.

If you want to just play the game accordingly, it's just as time consuming to be "rewarded" (still not sure what exactly that term means to you, going infinite or what). You need to figure out the meta, follow the meta, analyze the meta, and then adjust your deck accordingly. I did that for the last standard rotation and it was fairly time consuming for the one deck that I played. That was with nothing but my own personal interests on the line, I can't even imagine how much time I would have invested if there were actual stakes.

The reason I tell you all of this is that it is highly unlikely that you'll be playing 1 deck for any singular standard rotation so you might as well cover some of the costs just by keeping your ears to the ground. You'll be doing that anyways when you play decks.