It's not the card speculators suing, it's the corpo investors.

To be fair, the reserve list's existence has set the precedent that WotC approves of this behavior at least a little.

People might have access to the best cards without spending copious amounts of money to middlemen!

I mean, you joke, but this isn't an unreasonable critique. A big component of the MTG popularity boom was the regular distribution chain, necessitating a huge constellation of second-hand collectors and traders. Overproducing deck-specific cards that flood the market destroys the baseload of people buying cards from the retailer.

Hasbro is effectively eating its own seed corn. It's fucking over the people who will buy a thousand boxes of crap looking for half a dozen copies of the card that sells secondhand for a profitable margin.

It’s very dangerous to the game if people can be good at it without it being rich!

Outside a few niche vintage and legacy tournaments, you can be very good at the game without needing to own the highest end cards. Plenty of people run pauper decks that can outperform the high end decks when played with a working knowledge of what those high end decks try to do (ie, The Meta). Mono-green elves and mono-red goblins have dominated the game space practically since its inception. You'll rarely find a release year where you struggle to build one of these decks for less than $50. And that's assuming you and a few friends don't draft regularly and luck into the right cards, then trade among yourselves to build a winning board.

What Hasbro is doing is more akin to the Louvre coming out with identical print copies of high end auctioned paintings. I'd say the bigger complaint isn't that they're doing this so much as that they're getting in on a game third-party forgers have been playing for decades.

You can go online and find an Unlimited series duplicate Mox Emerald for maybe $20. And it'll pass muster at any game table in America that doesn't have a professional on staff to check its print number.

i heard its quite expensive now to get into physical MTG, because of the chase cards of UB. they also dont have easy physical to online mtg pipeline either.