> I used to play in Magic: the Gathering tournaments (several years back), and the same argument was used. "The game always goes to the person who has spent the most money." So they try all kinds of things to restrict the card pool, so people can't use that as an advantage. They limit the tournament to recent sets, which changes it from "whomever spent the most money" to "whomever spent the most money *recently.*" They try "sealed deck" tournaments - at which everybody buys the cards to be used at the door - which introduces a heavy amount of luck. Altogether, there's no way to make sure that money and luck aren't going the be the deciding factors. And, personally, I'd rather it come down to the person who spent the most money improving his game than to the luck of the draw.

This always struck me as moronic. I always thought that the REAL way to fix that would have been to do away with the artificial scarcity (the rarity system) that drove up the price of certain cards. But instead Wizards just brought in a ton of other lame ideas that Darien mentioned, and tournaments stopped being fun.

Ste "Don't even get me started on those holo-foil cards..." phen