Still, I am staggered by the dodginess of the business model, or rather why it hasn't been called out more yet. Maybe it has, and I missed it. Or maybe the D&D wokewashing is just working as intended.
As an ex-magic player who quit specifically for the reasons of power creep and addiction grabbing, it's somewhat complicated. It has absolutely been called out, but the game is played in many different types of formats.
A popular one (I think the most popular one) is drafting. You make a 1-time use deck from random cards from a collection that your friends invest in together, and there are mechanics to deck making by itself. So even if unbalanced, the unbalanced nature is a game in it itself.
There is also that many boardgames or cardgames of such manner can become stale because similar to chess the best moves have been optimized so much that there is basically nothing new to do. So new cards can mix things up, and generally its hard to make new cards that are just lateral moves.
Now, all that apologia is out of the way: It's absolutely a pay-to-win game that preys on gambling addicts. All collectible trading card games are. In addition the amount of ways Wizards has been abusing its addicts has very steadily gone up over the years:
Way more releases, new rarities that demand more investment of money for cards, and generally sloppier balancing.
This has been called out DECADES ago, but it just sorta became a staple.