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I was there at Carnegie Mellon's gaming club in 1994, ground zero for the explosion that was Magic: the Gathering. I witnessed people taking their paychecks down to the local game store and exchanging them for boxes of cards. I saw these same people begging others to take their boxes of old Commons that were useless. I saw people trying desperately to find ways to organize their collections so they could build a deck in some reasonable amount of time.

It turned out that collecting was fun, trading was fun, building decks was fun, playing was fun... but organizing thousands of cards into some coherent system was tedious and boring. Somewhere along the line I stopped bothering with it; it took too much time that was better spent playing games. If I play these days, it's with preconstructed decks... just so I don't have to think like a librarian.

Dominion solves this problem in a unique way. It's a standalone game where the players build their decks during play as part of the game.