It's honestly not so much that set. It's the sheer amount of new supplemental sets that they're throwing out, many of which are cards that you basically _have_ to but to remain competitive.
Formats like legacy and vintage are no longer things you can buy into and play a similar deck for a long period of time. Instead, they're things where you have to buy new cards once every two to four weeks to remain competitive. That's a big change from a few years back when those formats tended to be relative stable for 1-2 year periods.
That's the real thing that folks are frustrated with. The 30th anniversary packs are just something that's easy to point at and go "this is a money grab". If it were just those, it would really be a "to each their own".
Having the creator of the game say "..keep focused on this idea that this is a game first. As if you treat it as a collectible first then you are not doing your game players any favors" during the same event before they announced $300 for 60 proxies threw gas on it.
> It's the sheer amount of new supplemental sets that they're throwing out, many of which are cards that you basically _have_ to but to remain competitive.
That’s literally been going since around Mirrodin. It’s why I gave up on the game.
Now I just have a massive set of only commons that everyone can build their decks with and I don’t have to deal with the insane power inflation.
I think the problem has always existed, but to a much lesser extent than it has in the last 3-4 years. Vintage has always had the bulk of deck's value in Power 9 and lands, and the only recent changes there have been things like Mystic Sanctuary ($1 card), Cavern of Souls ($10 when it came out in 2012, now $50), Urza's Saga ($40), etc. Legacy & Modern also rely on an expensive but versatile land base, but in terms of staples they've both been hit hard by stuff like Modern Horizons 2 where stuff like Ragavan, Urza's Saga, and the elementals (Fury, Endurance, Subtlety, etc) are so pushed that they warp the metagame drastically. I can't think of a time when that was case in a way which impacted so many different decks. Some cards were problematic (Oko!) and made specific decks that included it much better for a time, but I've never seen a single set impact modern in such a big way.
Formats like legacy and vintage are no longer things you can buy into and play a similar deck for a long period of time. Instead, they're things where you have to buy new cards once every two to four weeks to remain competitive. That's a big change from a few years back when those formats tended to be relative stable for 1-2 year periods.
That's the real thing that folks are frustrated with. The 30th anniversary packs are just something that's easy to point at and go "this is a money grab". If it were just those, it would really be a "to each their own".