My roommate is big into magic, but he refuses to spend a lot of money on it. He makes counterfeit cards of whatever he wants and gets a deck custom printed for $40. He's also part of a discord group that makes cool fake cards or changes artwork on existing ones.

They're not allowed to have the official back but since he uses sleeves no one can tell. He's really up front about it and talks about how he couldn't get into the hobby or make the decks he likes if he had to pay for real cards.

Don't forget commander, which a lot of places claim is now the most popular format. Pre-constructed commander decks can cost as little as $20-40 and competitive commander decks can easily go into the thousands.

The game also has a very high skill ceiling. I think that's one of the main reasons why magic has such a broad age range to its player base. There's plenty of weird lines of play, from strange card / rule interactions to weird deck themes no one else would think of.

Isn’t “pauper” cheaper than standard?

Also don’t forget that when the meta changes that expensive deck’s value can change (usually for the worse)

I quit playing in 1996. It wasn't too rare to have a $2000 to $3000 deck even back then. And that's when every card store had a Black Lotus for sale without having to notify their insurance company.

I always felt like Modern was cheaper in the long run than Standard. Spending hundreds of dollars every few months on a new set didn’t speak to me. Whereas I could buy a few cards here and there to upgrade me modern decks.