I think WotC might be positioning Historic as a sort of elite tier for people who are willing to pay the extra costs. Too bad - but no different than how legacy and modern function today.

I certainly don't agree with the wildcard double cost - think 2 years ahead, any new players will still need to spend thousands to get a decent historic collection to get started.

They will need to spend substantially less than if they needed to play legacy or vintage in papermagic. But in paper, you can sell that collection again. Often times a good bunch of the cards may have increased in value.

In MtGO you could also have sold that card. Hence the (business world evil) need for MTGA - which neatly removes that ability from the buyer. Going forward, you don’t own anything.

Now WoTC will completely control the value of all cards, and by removing the secondary market, controls all future value of what they ‘print.’ I won’t be surprised if some ‘reprints’ cost more than 2-1 in the future, there are certainly cards that are worth more than 2-1 if just any random mythic is a 1-1 card. How many wildcards would Time Walk be worth?

My only critique of their strategy: they should have waited to hook some people on the format before they started raising the price.

They should have waited a year, and then released a Modern Masters-esque set at triple or even 4x.

Well, we're getting somewhere

2:1 has been taken back - as expected. And as of now no one's demanding a further discount that would've been perfectly reasonable to begin with.

Also, additional cards are under further review, we can only hope for the best. As long as they do add cards they can always kill the format out of thin air.