My best friend does not play Magic. He plays Slivers. The rest of us? We're just food for the collective.

I haven't even picked up a deck of Magic cards in over two years. I'm really not a M:tG player. The idea of slivers is just kinda neat.

They're a blast to play, but I can't bring myself to do it.

So what about Mtg turns everyone off?

I have played Magic casually on occasion. I like green monster decks (RAR! Stompy stompy!) because they're kind of fun. There was one elf deck I had where I generated life and mana like crazy then my coup de grace was Taunting Elf with Venomous Dagger (or something) before steamrolling the other player with my buffed elves. It worked maybe 1-in-5 times.

Reasons I don't like Magic:

Financial Metagame
I don't like Magic and other collectible games where the person with the biggest wallet wins. Spamming booster packs in the hopes of getting the right rares to build the perfect deck simply does not appeal to me. Buying the cards individually isn't any cheaper. RPGs don't have this. Yes, D&D has a shit ton of supplements but none of them are required for you to play the game. You get a fully functioning system in the core 3 books of any edition (PHB, MM, and DMG). You may need to buy more books if you play in RPGA or whatever but for home play it's not required.

Arms Race Metagame
Magic is particularly insidious because if you want to play competitively on the tournament scene (even at friendly local tourneys), you have to keep on top of what the hot decks are at the moment. Some guy will win the Magic world tournament and everyone will copy his deck for six months. Then a deck that kills that one will come on the scene and you have to build your deck to counter the new one. Repeat ad inifinitum.

Blue Control
This is my personal hang up because I had a bad first experience with the game. In middle school one of my friends was really into Magic and he wanted to get me into the game. So he sat me down with a deck (red direct damage, I think) while he sat down with his favorite deck. Except he loved to play blue control. So he tried to teach me the game by not letting me play it. That kind of soured me on the entire game.

I have a sliver deck that can be like that. It still loses to a really aggressive burn or creature destruction deck, but otherwise all the Slivers get HUGE and just swallow everyone else at the table up.

Heh, yeah...one on one, he's kinda hosed against most of my decks. I tend to go for control+mass destruction or something fast. We prefer 4+ player free for all, though. You can pull off a lot of craziness in that format.

Casual MtG is very fun and I miss playing with friends. Tournament MtG (except Draft tournaments) is anti-fun because it's basically a coin toss to see who can start their 1-to-3 turn win engines first. As a casual player attempting to bring a casual deck to a tournament, I got destroyed and had zero fun.

The other problem is keeping up with new sets, or trying to catch up after being absent from the game for several card sets. It gets expensive.

I never worried about the arms race since I just played casually, but the others, yeah, I totally feel you.

Blue control is bad but blue counter decks were even more/just as frustrating. Blue was/is the dick color.

Ultimately I left because of what you call the financial metagame and I referred to as the 61 card deck (the 61st is a platinum visa).

I may even be misusing the terminology. All I know is that I'd ask him, "What do I do now?" and he would tell me. Then, as I follow his directions, he'd play a card and say, "Except it doesn't work because I [block/counter/negate/insert proper term here] it."

All told it was like trying to convince a friend to play baseball by explaining the rules and then hitting him in the nuts with a bat whenever he did anything - just 'cuz you could.