Magic players whine. This is a fact. They whine a lot more than people playing other games, mainly because MtG is VERY old for a card game, and has a huge fan base, so you can't always please everyone. Also, due to economy issues and fan base growth, the game has undergone several price adjustments over the years, and people still remember when the game was cheaper.
Every time Wizards tries to do something different, a bunch of players will grab their torches and pitchforks, and embark on a "Wizards is going to kill Magic" crusade. Sure, it's bound to happen some day, nothing lasts forever, but really, compare Magic to, oh, say, ANY OTHER trading card game, and you'll quickly see Magic will outlast them all, and that the game is doing fine.
The problem is, of course, psychological. People do not like change, that is a known psychological fact, and everything that knocks you out of your confort zone is bound to make you unhappy at first. However, if they don't do stuff like that every once in a while, new players stop coming to the game after some time, and THAT makes games die.
Also, remember, Wizards usually does not completely nullifies older cards when they print newer ones (which might have helped kill LotR earlier, due to the culture reformulation), they just keep adding to the game. Sure, every once in a while, they slip up, but they always try to fix it. Something is overpowered? Print countermeasures. Still not good enough? Bring in the ban ax.
The latest crusade from the Magic Community has been the flip cards coming out with Innistrad. For those of you not familiar with the concept, it shows cards transforming, to capture the flavor of werewolves and vampires, so when the trigger takes place, the card is flipped, and the other side of the card has different statistics, even color sometimes; it's a whole new card to play with.
What most people are complaining about is in Drafts, where those will probably be replaced by the God-awful Checklist cards so people can't see the back of your card.
As the first argument, I'm compelled to answer it first: walls. Ever seen a domino championship? Yeah, it works. Just get a small L-shaped piece of whatever material you want, and make players look at their cards behind them (and online, the problem does not exist, of course). Yeah, shocker, U$2.00 solves all your problems, who knew, right?
Then, we have the complaints about having to take the cards out of the sleeves every time to flip them.
Sure, this is a pain, but how about, oh, say, you make "tokens" of the OTHER SIDE of your flip cards? Keep them sleeved over a land card or whatever, and simply pop them from inside your deckbox and over the transformed card when it transforms (or, of course, get 8 copies of every card, depending on how geeky you are). Oh, wow, look at that, U$0.10 a card solves the problems again!
Then, they have the complaints that people won't be able to play without sleeves anymore. For this, I say: really? Casual playes don't give a dire rat's #$&*@! if you can see the back of a card, and tournament players SHOULD play with sleeves in the first place anyway. Also, sleeves are ridiculously cheap now, since a million companies are making them.
Personally, I think the flip cards are kinda weird to look at, since I recognize they take me out of my confort zone, but I think it's actually a way better idea than the old flip cards, and I think people should give Wizards some credit for producing the awesome game we all like, and rest asured that they WILL adress any issues that arise, so that it won't be clunky at all to play with them, so, before going on a crusade complaining that, basically, they changed something slightly and your narrow mind can't think of a single way to get the same results, doing the same thing, with something that is not the same object anymore, try to think about it a little, give it some time, and maybe, just maybe, it might be fun and not ruin Magic after all.
F. M.