h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yep, the key point to all this is that one needs a substantial amount of money to get really involved. As each game regularly brings out expansion sets (more cards) if you're a collector you need to get them all and if you're a player you'll need to get at least some to stay competitive. Magic is especially bad in this respect as to play competitively one needs to have cards from the most recent expansions as the older ones get rotated out of play.
Personally, I prefer collecting. I like playing too but it can be difficult to find people interested in 'fun' play. With so many tournaments out there people seem to have forgotten that these are customisable card 'games' and just download the most up to date tournament winning decks from the net and go out to beat someones brains out.

I thought it was "Collectable Card Game"?
Encouraging people to collect the cards they make as well as play with them is really a move ingenious by WOTC because the two hobbies complement each other quite well.
A player can buy a pack and get some obscure rare that he has no use for and go and find a trader who has 4 copies of some nice easily playable rare and it's in both of their interests to swap.
It's only worth having millions of cards as a player if you're going to play lots of tournaments though because if you're just playing casually it's a safer option using proxy cards (Healing Salve with Armageddon) or using a computer version like Apprentice that lets you play games with any cards you fancy.

FWIW - the online CCGs are somewhat cheaper - costs are around $50 to get reasonably competitive in ChronX ( http://www.chronx.com ) or Sanctum (dunno). There are also online CCGs coming out for Star Trek and WWF, but I don't have the URLs handy... if anyone's interested, I'll hunt them down...

On the one hand, you don't get to wave your cards in the other guys face and laugh manically, on the other hand, they don't lose value if they aren't pristine...

we had a word for playing cards really strongly...
we would play the card very slowly and bend the card slightly to emphasise how blatantly it was going to win the game.
this was called deploying a card and if the corner of the card was bent after this move then the card was regarded as deployed (being more deployed if the bend was really noticable).
this kinda made all of our helms of obediences and necropotences a bit tatty

Trouble is that it costs to be on-line, plus I have to compete with the rest of the family. And I can neither buy nor play cards while I'm at home because there are no shops around here that sell them. Which would be good for my (negative) back balance if it wasn't for the fact that the internet bookshop is very, very bad for it. And MVC doing special offers on videos you haven't seen, but want to.