How is Magic experienced today?
This morning I went to El Rastro in Madrid, where in "my days" there used to be a lot of people trading Magic cards. I'm talking about the early 2000s. We used to play at school (end of the 90s) and went to some tournaments and release events that were really a lot of fun. Also the trading experience of meeting random new people, look through their binders and almost always finding what you needed. It was the time of Urza's Saga. There were a lot of vintage cards around, but for people like me, the price of buying such cards to play in Type I tournaments was prohibitive.
Back to where I started, this morning I found basically people trading Pokemon and football trading cards and 0% Magic the Gathering. I asked around and it seems that up until Covid there was mostly Magic, but afterwards these people never returned. It also seems that Pokemon collectors are really mostly collectors, but very very few do play with the cards. I was quite surprised to find not a single Magic soul there, especially when a prerelease these days gets so quickly sold out and for such crazy prices.
Which brings me back to the title of this post: how is Magic experienced today? How is it in other European or American cities? Do people still gather in flee markets or similar places to physically exchange, buy and sell cards? Do people play with the cards at all?