You seem to be overlooking a huge thing - collectibles have an (above-the-board) resale value. While perhaps the market crashes someday, for 25 years Magic cards have done nothing but go up in value. I'm personally up tens of thousands of dollars lifetime from paper Magic, and some thousands from dabbling in digital. And all of it was purchased for play, not investment.
Non-collectible virtual goods have dubious resale value. You can technically sell game accounts I suppose, but it's inevitably against Terms of Service and commensurately difficult.
That was an entirely bizarre incident with entirely unique circumstances. Nothing similar has ever happened before, or may ever happen again once the troll is shot down in court.
Among other things it involves someone who's made 2,200 sales on a marketplace and was dabbling in straight up speculation.
When all my friends got into MtG back in high school I said, "I'll play but I'm going to make my own cards. I don't want to buy them from the store." But no one would go for it. I never understood. I used to say, "But there are no actual wizards at Wizards of the Coast."
Yeah, that was a thing for us too circa 1996. It ended with there being two groups of players: "Poor" players that printed cards and had access to the entire card catalog and could build insane cheese, and "rich" players who didn't and didn't.
Then there were the my-dad-owns-a-textile-mill types who would learn a cheese from the print-it-yourselfers, spend millions of lire on cards, and replicate the cheese with the people who played with the official cards.
It seems making it "pay a lot to win" isn't that much better than straight pay-to-win. I never understood how these players could tolerate broken mechanics in such an expensive game.
