But why would you use TCG mid? You'd have to go out of your way to pay TCG mid even when using TCG. It defaults to sorting by price lowest-to-highest when you click on a card, and then there's a button you can push to optimize the cart and make it as cheap as possible, with the option to keep the same conditions and editions.

By contrast, you'd need to change your filters or sorting and then manually pick more expensive cards if you wanted to actually buy at TCG mid. And the cards come lightning fast if you go with Direct buyers (which again the optimizer makes extremely easy).

Sure, the mid price might be more representative of what the price tags look like in stores, but we live in an age where you can order these things with your phone and have them in your house the day after next, so people are hardly stuck paying large markups unless they need cards on the day of events.

Mid prices made sense when the only cards available were ones that people were trading or selling in the local store and people were looking up prices in Scrye or InQuest. But we live in an age of such ease of purchasing and access to huge marketplace of sellers that it seems ridiculous to just pretend like cards cost much more than they do because that's the price tag they'd have at a brick-and-mortar store or the price from a TCG seller that's on the 5th page of results.