I find I don't enjoy online play of much of anything other than RPGs these days. I've heard the Arena implementation is great, though.
Right now I plan to buy some physical products for collecting and for kitchen table play with D&D-loving friends: the four Commander decks and . . . what? I dislike foil cards so it sounds like collector boosters are not for me (they also appear to be by far the worst value for money). What, then? A set booster box? A draft box? Some fat packs? I dunno. What, precisely, is even in these? While the preorders are already up in many places, not all of the specifics on what exactly is included in the products are available.
I haven't looked at MTG at all in a while and it's evident that at least in terms of the product range, it's more baffling than ever for a casually interested customer to figure out what to purchase. The products don't even have MSRPs anymore!
I suppose part of the problem is that this is more or less the first MTG set ever produced where a lot of people who don't really care about MTG are interested in buying it. Before now, they only had to figure out how to appeal to (and communicate with) the various kinds of MTG players. Now they need to communicate with prospective buyers who aren't primarily buying because they like MTG. So far they're not doing that (for this prospective buyer, anyway).
There is no one anywhere who said "I could take or leave MTG but I want to buy Ixalan products because I'm a huge fan of Ixalan." But that's basically where I am with this. I certainly don't care about alt-arts or foils at all, I don't want to participate in game-store play, and I also don't want any non-D&D-themed cards—zero—which I mention because apparently some product types usually include reprints of cards from previous sets. (Will they this time too? Who knows!) What I want is a nice playable-for-casual-play, not-obsessively-complete-but-mostly-complete-for-gameplay-purposes collection of this one set. It's hard to even figure out what and how much to purchase in order to fulfill that. How much should I buy, and of what, to get one copy of most of the rare cards in the set and have a good array of deckbuilding options at my disposal to create decks for casual play? When last I used to be into CCGs, this was still a relatively simple question to answer, no matter what game you were talking about. Looking at the product range for the FR MTG set, it would appear that there is no longer a straightforward answer at all, and that this is by design.
