There's certainly a lot of overlap with the general gacha concept, but I think at least in the case of Magic the very robust secondary market leads to very diff

There's certainly a lot of overlap with the general gacha concept, but I think at least in the case of Magic the very robust secondary market leads to very different dynamics than kompu gacha systems. For me, at least, back when I played Magic, I never ever opened a pack in the hope of getting a card; what I would do is open a pack in the hopes of getting stuff to trade for the card. In addition, the distribution of value from a pack of Magic cards was pretty even. If you opened 3-4 packs, you would be very unlikely to get the rare card you wanted, but you'd be quite likely to get cards you could trade. There's also published data on rarity and distributions. Ultimately, I think the kompu gacha systems work by exploiting the sunk cost fallacy. You've already spent $X on prizes, but it's worthless because you don't have the one ultra-rare one you need. But if you spend another $Y, you have a chance of making the earlier investment valuable. With Magic, typically, after you spend $X on cards you have less than $X worth of cards, but not a lot less. If you don't get the one ultra-rare one, you still have, worst case, a bunch of junk rares and some decent uncommons you could trade or, worst case, sell to a dealer. And, crucially, the previous investment doesn't become more valuable if you finally do get the ultra-rare. ...that being said, a huge, huge part of the money the companies behind them earn is because of the random nature of the packs. So...I guess I'd grade it as mildly exploitive, perhaps, but only mildly. :)