Artificial Shortages

I play Magic: The Gathering. I play Magic: The Gathering competitively. It's important to note this, so that one can understand that I'm not coming from the perspective of a casual player whining about the prices of individual cards so that their format non-specific Mono Blue Control deck can have a single Jace The Mind Sculptor in it to randomly win games for them. I play the game to win, because winning and fun have a direct relationship in my mind. And to win, one must obtain the best cards, and put them in the best combination to create the maximum amount of winning scenarios physically possible in their 75-card lists. But Wizards of the Coast has recently made doing so significantly more expensive.

Magic: The Gathering has a long history of having expensive cards. Tarmogoyf is a great example of this. Why was Tarmogoyf so expensive? Because it was phenomenal in every format. It was an automatic 4-of in every single list playing Green. There were almost 0 decks that weren't interested in playing it, even when Green wasn't a color they normally considered, even Faeries and Fish both played green specifically for 'goyf. There was a tremendous demand for Tarmogoyf. When the card was first released, he was relatively cheap (resting quietly at around $20 for a single copy) yet he still crept up to a high of over $100 for just a single copy of him. That's because he was in the last set of his block, which always gets drafted significantly less than the other two sets in the block. There was a legitimately low supply.

Wizards of the Coast is, first and foremost, a business. So when they saw this, they obviously decided to capitalize. Shortly after the end of Time Spiral Block, we were introduced to "Mythic" rarity. Before I go into what a mythic rare is, it's important to note that Wizards of the Coast introduced the community to mythic rare as something being done only for "flavor". Something to make process of opening packs more exciting by sometimes opening a rarer-than-normal card. They said almost explicitly that these mythic rares would not be tournament staples.

Bullshit. A mythic rare, as termed by wizards is "twice as rare" as a normal rare card (which appear in every booster pack. Each pack contains 10 commons, 3 uncommons and one rare or mythic rare). So to be twice as rare as something that occurs 1 out of every 1 pack, you'd simply have to make it appear in 1 out of every 2 packs. Right? Well, Wizards of the Coast must have an unusual way of doing their math, since they appear in approximately 1 out of every 8 packs. And that whole nonsense about not being tournament staples? Of course they are.

But not all mythics are created equal. There are mythics that are about on par with uncommon cards, and then there are the mythics that are tournament staples. Ones that are so far above the power curve that any deck that isn't using them are automatically worse than a deck that is. Ones like Jace the Mind Sculptor, who is currently resting pretty at $110 per copy. But Jace the Mind Sculptor doesn't have the demand that our friend Tarmogoyf did. He's not widely playable in anything besides Standard. He's not worth playing Blue specifically for (though he is the reason Blue is a legitimate color in Standard once again). So why is he so god damn expensive?

Because Wizards of the Coast is a business.

tl;dr
Artificial shortages created by companies, especially game companies, are shit.