At least someone is asking the right questions.

For many people not paying the artists is less fun, for nearly everyone paying 10x the price is not fun. Obviously a brillian game might overcome this but it can easily cause someone to move on.

right? Net Runner specifically allows proxy cards at events and even give you pdfs to print you own cards. Owning random expensive cards is no way to play a fair game.

I used to be deep into the competitive MTG scene. It goes deeper than this. Everyone knew that foils caused warping, which would lead to different theories of the “best way” to foil your deck to get an edge, while also being plausibly deniable that you were essentially marking your deck with foils if someone called a judge on you.

At the high level MTG is as much about rules lawyering as it is about actual skilled play, if you’re curious to learn more about this aspect of the game go learn about the 1997 pro tour with Mike Long, who infamously took the win by mind games and causing his opponent to concede when Long had no path to victory.

DropMix was an NFC DJing game that used RFID playing cards. It’s been done/could be done again.

You can program them with an app on your phone or Flipper Zero.

I dunno, you could build a "smart playmat" that keeps track of your board state and helps a bit with the math.

Fakes don't actually hurt the game. Just print out whatever cards you want and play with them, nobody is hurt and you don't pay usury prices to a company literaly printing money.

The idea is more for collecters, get something hard to clone that supports public key crypto like the more recent NXT miifare cards. Program them with a unique number and key each and you could do remote verification that someone holds the card in question. Registries of card location etc. hell if you are clever you could invent a little database and state machine to load on the card to store it's values and logic in electronic access form.