We live in a bold, new era in game monetization. A full-production desktop game that is free-to-play makes on the order of $37.5 million every year. Games companies that see less than 5% of their users ever spend a cent make almost $1 Billion a year in revenue. Entirely new ways of selling games are being devised every day. How should a game developer pick a monetization method in these crazy times? To help us understand what really drives consumers to open up their wallets for their favorite games, I suggest we look back to one of the progenitors of micro-transactions, Magic: The Gathering(MTG from here on out).At first glance, it would seem to be easy to answer the question “What is the monetization method of MTG?”  ”Simple,” you might say, “They sell packs of cards,” which is true of course, but there is a lot of nuance rolled up in those packs of cards.