I enjoy Magic the Gathering, but I hate that it’s leashed with copyright and patent stuff, and basically pay to win with Wizard’s bogus artificial scarcity. You take a look at classics like Chess - no one owns Chess, it’s public domain. Consequently we get a continuous stream of gameplay variants, as well as all manner of Chess sets with virtually any feature and style of art you can think of.
But I realized that even though proxies are kind of a gray area, that doesn’t mean I have to treat them like they have less value than “official” cards. What if there are proxies with truly inspired design and artwork, for example? If people are putting their time and heart into these, why not boost that?
Does anyone here know of any great MTG proxies?
This isn’t really an answer to your question, but you should honestly try Netrunner. It’s a cool game that previously was originally created by Richard Garfield, briefly lived at WotC and then was rebooted and run by Fantasy Flight Games as Android: Netrunner, but now is 100% community managed.
https://nullsignal.games/ is the community managing the game, they release new expansions about once a year and run tournaments. You can print and play the game 100% for free and there is no artificial scarcity. The community is small but active. A new expansion just came out in early March, Vantage Point. They also maintain a set of “starter decks” for newbies.
You can also play online for free at https://jinteki.net/ - people there are very welcoming and many are very happy to teach new players.