For years, I have been playing a card game called Magic! The Gathering with friends from high school. Luckily, at Cal Poly, I found a club where I can play as well as a local game shop that holds weekly events. However, I started to come across people who, instead of buying the cards from a shop or trading for specific cards, would print them out and use them to play instead. At first, I was incredibly frustrated with these people. I thought they were taking away from the small businesses that would sell those cards and were unfairly winning matches due to having these proxies (cards printed from the internet). However, after playing this past Friday at a Game Theory club meeting, I started to think about why they would be in the position to print out these cards and came to the realization that many of the cards they wished to play were well over $15. Some even reaching up to $30-40 for a single copy. That is so much money to spend on just one card, especially in a deck that contains up to 100 cards. I tend to avoid cards that cost more than $10 per copy, so I didn’t realize how ridiculously expensive some of them were getting. Knowing that everyone doesn’t have the budget to spend on a $15 plus piece of cardboard, it makes the game less fun if you can’t compete with the more competitive people solely because you can’t afford a $30 card. Now, I have begun to hold less frustration to those who use proxies in their decks, and instead try to keep their financial situation in mind.
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