For sure agree with you on a lot of this man. I stopped playing the game this last time around 1.5 years ago or so, and haven't looked back. I was renting my cards actively but even that I haven't checked in 4-5 months, so who only knows what's going on with my deck. I had some good cards at that! I just didn't have thousands of dollars to keep dumping into the game, as fun as it was. I was also around during Alpha, though towards the end but for sure Beta.

I think the reason I actually stopped playing was because the mechanics changed quite a bit, not that I was upset it changed but I was losing a lot more and ended up getting way more frustrated than I should have been, as I'm not an angry type of person.

Sadly it was one of the best things for me when I committed to not playing anymore, and I haven't looked back since. It's a shame too, because the game was a lot of fun and had a lot of potential.

I don't know where things went wrong, most certainly as someone who isn't in the team of people building and trying to improve the game I can't say a lot in that regard, but it for sure is something I don't really intend on playing again, sadly.

To one of your other comments, I'm pretty sure MOST people that play the game truly can't afford it and end up going into massive debt because of it, so that's pretty fucked.