Getting into TCGs in 2026 - should I, and which one?
I mainly play Gwent on PC. I am familiar with MtG's rules.
The reason I am looking to go into TCGs in 2026 is to get into an additional community, potentially make friends and honestly I kinda miss that feeling of opening boosters, trading, doing tourneys and the board game feel (without actually playing board games).
From what I've seen, the only viable candidates (I am in southern EU) are MtG, Pokemon, Yugioh, Star Wars Unlimited and Lorcana.
For now, I am considering only Pokemon or MtG, as Yugioh seems prohibitively expensive (and frankly a game I wouldn't like to play as I used to play it as a kid and it's so much different than what I am used to). The other 2 games seem nice, but have a very small community, and I doubt their staying power.
So for MtG, it seems that everything except Commander and Pauper is super expensive. I am an adult working with a job, but the idea of spending 100+ Euro on a meta deck seems absurd to me. Also, sets seem to rotate fairly often, leaving me with no cards to play in some formats, unless I get new ones.
The pros are that the art is awesome, game is more complex, community is the biggest and I think I'd enjoy deckbuilding more.
Pokemon on the other hand seems like a "kid game". I know it's for adults, but I've also played this as an even younger kid, and while I appreciate beautiful and whimsy nature of the artworks now more than as a teen, it's still cartoon at the end of the day. The gameplay seems simpler and less interactive, but the big advantage seems that to play, it's really cheap.
What do you think? What are your thoughts? This is just based off research, online and IRL and I might've missed a lot of things.