But there you're, like you said, trading the cards. In games such as Magic, the secondary market is a pretty important thing, not only for the players, but also for Wizards of the Coast and large singles sellers, and you can always trade your cards to other people, sometimes for market price and sometimes for more or less (maybe some player really likes collecting angel cards and will trade you extra for one, or doesn't care about a card s/he doesn't intend to play anyway so s/he's willing to trade it away for cheap). The secondary market means you can crack $4 booster packs to get a shot at getting expensive chase cards... or you can go to your secondary market vendor of choice and get just the card you want for a price dictated by how powerful and in demand the card happens to be at the time.
In these kind of games, the random loot is often stuck in your account once you get it, so you can't actually trade your items for other people's in order to get the ones you want. Even that game dynamic alone makes for a huge difference, since the whale could trade their surplus items (or ones they don't even care about) to get the one thing they do want with more ease, and of course the game economy doesn't want them to do that.
Basically, the system relies on people not getting what they want with the hopes that they will continue feeding the company money until they do, and that's what some of us here are condemning.
