How expensive should cards be?

I definitely am fine with whatever the free market sets prices to be (supply vs demand, etc).

In my own experience, I have never purchased a card that costs more than $100. However, I do intend to eventually buy a Moat ($200+) for one of my EDH decks, so I guess I'm fine with paying a lot of money for some rare cards.

Maybe it's a bit of vanity, but I like that I or some other person could have an expensive deck, or a very rare card. I get really excited when I see a player opposite me play a dual land in their EDH deck that they've built over years of collecting. If cards were much less monetarily valuable, I think I'd lose a chunk of my enthusiasm for the game as a hobby.

Collecting & playing go hand in hand for me. I'm not buying up or sitting on things speculating, but it does feel satisfying to finally finish an exotic/rare deck. If the most expensive card was, for example, $10, then I'd not really care about getting a card other than being able to play with it. As a middle class guy, spending $40 on tcgplayer for a playset of very rare in-demand cards would be convenient, but it wouldn't feel the same. There's a thrill to knowing I'm so into the hobby that I'm willing to go overboard. There's a good feeling with knowing that, worst case, I could sell a deck for a large amount of very real cash. It's cool that I could reasonably trade a fetchland for my share of ordering dinner.

I've been building a modern deck for over a year now. With MM2015 release, I'll pick up the last 3 cards I want and be done. If the most expensive card was $10 and all the other prices fell proportionately to that, then I'd have bought the whole deck over a year ago and this journey of budgeting and researching and discussions and trading and all that would never have happened, and I think I have had as much fun working on getting the deck as I will when I start playing it at events.

/r/magicTCG Thread