It's like they've turned into the Comcast of table top games.
What do they really have beyond their brand? People can play other games.
Certainly Dungeons and Dragons has tons of competition from other systems and I won't be playing it anymore, but it does have the network effect and weekly hosted games and name recognition.
MTG, I think, doesn't have serious competition. It is a unique juggernaut. Playing a 5e D&D game today has no relation to old 2e adventures, but many forms of Magic make use of ancient cards with serious monetary value.
Magic is also such an intricate and surprisingly balanced game and has something that other games somehow always struggle with: exactness. There is, technically, no room for interpretation on any Magic card (please correct me if I'm wrong here, I haven't played in 5+ years). Every possible interaction has a precise outcome that can be derived from the rules, or at worst from card-specific errata which are available freely and easily online.
The combination of amazing art, historic value, well-known lore, a massive library, and exact gameplay makes MTG difficult to buck. I'm certainly not buying any more cards, but I don't know where I would start looking if I got the itch for a card game again.
The comprehensive rules are intended to be fully comprehensive, with only simply logic needed to connect the parts. If this has failed anywhere leaving something without a clear resolution this would be considered a defect in the comprehensive rules or the card's canonical text.
Such defects are not especially common, as they tend to get noticed before new cards or mechanics are released. This is especially true since WOTC ends up programming these mechanics into software not once but at least twice. (First for MTGO, and then again for MTG Arena's backend, and sometimes needing to program it again for the Arena's front end code.)
The need to program it into the software gives makes it much more likely than any remaining ambiguity in the Card's Oracle text or the comprehensive rules gets noticed and addressed.
There seems to have been several reshuffles of just how legally independent WotC is from Hasbro over the years, although I’m not sure those legal reshuffles are indicative of how much actual power Hasbro was exercising.
My general impression is that WotC had found a point on the Pareto curve of “greedy” vs “respectful” where they were quite greedy but also quite respectful, and Hasbro’s more recent influence has pushed them into “very greedy”, not realizing the Pareto curve was extremely steep and so this caused a corresponding move all the way from “quite respectful” to “very disrespectful”.
“It was never our intention when we came on board this film to make a franchise . . . I think that would cloud our ability to focus entirely on the film at hand. The cardinal mistake many studios make is to put the cart before the horse, where they start crafting a cinematic universe before they even make a good single film. So first and foremost for us was getting this right.”
https://www.polygon.com/23665427/dungeons-and-dragons-honor-...
No definitely not