Magic the Gathering's Accessibility Problem
It is not the cards. You can buy the exact cards you need from third party sites for pennies. They changed the border and text design years ago to make the cards easier to read. The online version is literally free to play. The game is accessible to anyone.
The problem is the lore. Who is Nissa? Who is Jace? Who were Kamahl and Jeska? The Weatherlight? Praetors?
We just got a massive influx of new Magic players thanks to the Final Fantasy set. (Whether yall like it or not.) Many hadn't played in decades only to come back to all this new stuff they had missed. I myself was in the same boat as I was oblivious to the lore of the game post 2004. We just played decks with themes like "all zero cost artifacts", "all blue whale monsters", "no creatures deck", etc. There were no Planeswalkers yet. I would see them on posters at shops and stuff later on but never played with the cards.
Then back when the D&D set came out we started buying cards again. To find out who Liliana was I had to go to the wiki articles on her. You still have to go back to the wiki's to find out the history and lore from the older cards. As far as playing the game you don't need to know the lore, "reading the card explains the card" but people like to play as specific characters. They have their favorites and Wizards uses that IP to promote the sets.
If I go to a shop and see black booster packs with Liliana on the wrapper I now that the set is going to be about cool dark magic stuff, perhaps some of the cards will be spicy board wipes or sliver mechanics. If Jace or Ral is on the wrappers I'm going to be bored out of my mind with paragraph long card text and game mechanics so crunchy it makes broken glass feel soft.
But I'm the kind of person who loves a good wiki dive. I'll read through all the little bits and fun stuff. But normal people aren't going to spend 4 hours researching the history of phyerexian oil. These new players who just found out that the game is fun to play are going to want to know who the big white lion guy is.
Back in the day the story played out on the cards themselves. The flavor text would mention Ugin before he was ever a card. Nobody is going to go buying up dirty old bulk to get caught up on the game storyline. Back when I was in high school the bundles (at the time known as Fat Packs) came with a small paperback novel that was jam packed with the lore following that set. Pretty soon the costs of producing that lead to them ditching it for online digital Planeswalkers Guides.
Great, you should just be able to go on Magic's site and read all those...
Oh
K.
So just hit the internet Wayback Machine to read up on it. Again, that's something people like us do who love a good lore dump deep dive like we're investigating X-Files. Regular game players aren't going to do this. They will treat it just like the fat pack bundles and toss them out to get to the cards and start playing.
Now, I will say that starting recently Wizards has been releasing the lore in bite sized chunks via podcasts. They are on par with audio books as far as production goes and are released regularly before a new set drops. They did this with the latest Tarkir and it was nice to learn who was going to be in the set and why there were there. They are doing the same right now with Edge and I really do think this is the right track going forward.
People who play magic and people who listen to podcasts all day overlap significantly. Learn about the lore while doing your spreadsheets at work. 10/10 this is the way to go.
The problem is access to the old lore. I hear that they have signed some papers over making a Magic movie or streaming series. A series would be a great way to cover the historic lore and sell more in universe sets in the future - because people will know who the characters are. Give each saga a season, have the studio who did the animation for that League of Legends show make it look like the card art and they'll be swimming in cash.
When I first started selling cards a year ago I wanted to make sure I didn't sound like an idiot for not knowing who the characters were. I spent two months going through the wiki's and watching fan made history videos on YouTube. It's a lot of content to get through. It's like going through the history of every single X-Men character.
It's just that, very very few people have been playing and keeping up with the card game and it's lore for 30 years straight. At some point a player will join in and want to know what is going on, be they new or returning. There needs to be a much more digestible way to bring them up to speed.