1. $15 packs for the top 5%, Ultimate Masters and future products. These are premium booster boxes in the $300 and above range.
2. $10 packs for the top 5% that enable players in this wealth bracket to mingle with folks in the bottom 95%, Modern Masters, Eternal Masters, others, and now, Modern Horizons. These are premium booster boxes in the $180-$220 range.
3. $4 packs for the bottom 95%, Standard sets and the occasional special product, such as Battlebond and Commander. This is Magic for the masses.
Unless you are willing to spend $500 and above per month on Magic, you will not be able to afford this hobby at tiers 1 and 2. These tiers are for Modern, Legacy, Vintage, and hardcore Commander players/collectors/investors. That means you will have to pass on an ever-increasing range of products. These products are very desirable for a Magic player. You can make some awesome pulls out of those $10, $15 packs.
If you, like me, are a peasant, you are buying battlecruiser packs and Commander precons. That's it. There is still MTGO, where many cards are cheap to rent, but then you are in a split platform world: MTG Arena (MTGA) for Standard, and MTG Online (MTGO) for all other formats.
There is everything right with Wizards trying to make as much money as possible, and we peasants should not feel bad that the company needs to do this in order for us to get our $4 packs, our birthright. Yet, as a peasant, I sense something is wrong with this tier model, and I long for the day when ALL packs will be $4, and also for the days when Wizards will once again be an independent company, no longer a conglomerate's cash cow to make up for other dog areas of said conglomerate.
How long will the tier model stick? Maybe forever. Every change comes with a possible secondary effect, something no one could have foreseen. I think there is a scenario in which players who would have purchased the content in tiers 1 and 2 substitute with other games. But this is just a scenario. Another scenario, which I think is more realistic, is that Wizards' tiered model milks the last generation of players willing to pay absurd amounts of money for artsy cardboard.
In my case, I have substituted with Pokemon, but I am a trend of one person, and that is not data. I will continue buying occasional Standard packs and Commander decks for paper, and testing out tier 1 and tier 2 products on MTGO. I am excited about Modern Horizons, but only for MTGO. I have so far refused to collect any of the tier 1 and tier 2 packs. I just can't do that.
