I've been playing magic since 1994 and never looked back. The game is awesome, though many of the denizens of game shops are pretty immature and annoying so I am more into just playing with my friends over beer and bbq... I have thousands and thousands of magic cards, it's ridiculous..
I used to play Magic back during 4th ed and got irritated with the way they started doing things around 7th ed... still have a fairly large collection and play in casual games with friends/family but I avoid tournaments then and now like the plague..
I like the four army/country start. It's really made a difference in the way people are playing imo. If you bundle your starting spots together, you put a lot of eggs in one basket. If you spread yourself out, it's going to take a while to get income.
more than one 1v1 ladders would solve this problem i think, maybe not fix it but give options without changing alot. if there isnt enough players in any given ladder then you would be able to change to the most popular ladder after enough time to determine whats best. I think it would also mix up the ladder system a bit, i pretty much only play ladder games now and i would like more than one setting but i dont like the idea of constant changing of the settings. There seems to be a good voting system in place so it would be easy to convince everyone to try the different ladders so they could choose what they like best.
