Well... it's not like the rest of us enjoy paying mana.
I do, I do!
Well, there's some nuance to this. So I'll say that firstly, the mana system in Magic is a firmly entrenched part of the game's mechanic that has been abandoned in virtually every subsequent CCG/TCG for similar sensible reasons. That's not a coincidence. It has been said that the designers of those other games learned from Magic's mistake, and that might be true. Magic's mana system adds an unfun kind of variance to gameplay, which was what inspired the "mulligan" concept in the first place, as a means to mitigate the problem. Setting aside the issue of mana color and its effect on deck construction, the simple fact is that you might get blown out by either drawing too many lands or too few lands, and that is an especially harsh kind of bad luck. By the very nature of card games, there's a random element that could affect any player. I might draw cards that are good against what you have or you might get really unlucky and fail to draw the cards you need to deal with what I have. That's the nature of the game. This isn't chess. The indeterminacy makes the strategy take the form of more probabilistic analysis than of extensive long-term board-reading and turn-planning. Richard Garfield has talked about this sort of thing in the past. Different types of game tend toward different types of strategy, and the strategy in Magic is meant to be more like the strategy in bridge than the strategy in chess. Some people interpret card games as being luck-based and cardless board games as being skill-based, but Richard Garfield contrived some thought experiments to explain that this line of thinking isn't right.
However, and I don't know that Richard Garfield and friends foresaw this part at all at the time, the variance induced by the randomization of deck-shuffling takes different forms and some of those forms are almost impossible to make into a fun situation for players. One of the anecdotes Mark Rosewater reuses a lot is from when Mike Long was playing ProsBloom in a major tournament and, in the final round, was set up to win on his next turn, but his opponent had a single way to turn the game around, and that was by topdecking Abeyance. Supposedly after the topdeck did indeed turn out to be Abeyance, the audience (in a different room) saw it on a camera and cheered so loudly that Mike Long knew he'd just lost. That kind of variance can be exciting! and exciting is fun. Not every game with that kind of variance is going to be fun, and some scenarios in most matchups are really only fun for one person. But the infamous "mana screw" and "mana drown" scenarios are pretty much inherently unfun for everyone involved and frustrating to eliminate for most decks in most environments. In Magic, we can try to mitigate them with rules changes and deckbuilding, but I do think it's telling that the type of mana system that causes this brand of variance only appeared in the very first CCG/TCG ever and seems to have been ruled out by the very nature of every subsequent game in the genre. It sure looks like an indictment! Game designers learned their lesson and didn't repeat the mistake of Magic: the Gathering. And that's not just a disagreement between the designers of Magic and a crowd of other game designers who fashioned their own card games: the same individuals who worked on Magic later went on to design other card games themselves, some of those at Wizards of the Coast, even. And none of them had this issue.
All that being said, Magic has more depth than just about any other game and my favorite thing about it is that there are so many options operating along so many different axes. The basic concept along the lines of "You have land cards and you have spell cards. You need your land cards to make mana and your spell cards cost mana" really does display the flaw that you might draw too many lands or too few lands and just never even get the opportunity to play the game at all, or worse yet,
both players might run into this in the same game and sit around doing nothing for several turns, which is even more boring than if it happens to only one person. But virtually every Magic set has done something interesting that uses the basic concept as a starting point and allows for
something else. Anything else, really. "The Hall of Illuminating Magic Decks" is a gallery of some notable demonstrations of this...
You can use lands as a resource to do something other than producing mana. You can weaponize the system itself with something like Manabarbs or Ankh of Mishra. You can rely on artifacts instead of lands to produce mana. You can circumvent mana production entirely with alternate casting cost spells. You can virtually ignore the consideration of actually resolving spells at all, as in the case of Manaless Dredge. You can increase the pressure of mana requirements with cards like Nether Void. There are so many options and when they compete against each other, the possibilities are dizzying in their scope. The mana system has its downsides, but it has enabled things like me blowing up everyone's manabases in high school when they got greedy with artifact lands and I was using Powder Keg, or Spiderman grinding out his opponents with classic synergies between mana-producing creatures and land-punishing cards like Winter Orb. The system is the framework that allows for even the decks that thwart it entirely, like Angry Hermit or Zero-Land Belcher. It lets me use lands drops for utility instead of mana-production, like The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale. And of course, it creates my favorite application, which is to use spells increase my available mana beyond what my lands could normally provide, with stuff like Bubbling Muck or Gaea's Touch.
Anyway, I do think that decks like MetaEsper and Golgari Affinity are very cool. But that's in part because of the framework Magic built with the mana system, not in spite of it. And as a lot of the posts I've been making have shown, when I talk about my own history with cards like Dark Ritual, Lion's Eye Diamond, Tolarian Academy, etc., I'm particularly fond of the combo shenanigans that mana acceleration cards provide. I'd go so far as to say that when it comes to the awkwardly unfun mana system that game designers would learn to eschew, Magic turned what was a weakness into a strength.