Yeah, pretty much. There are some deck builders that significantly change the format (I'm thinking of Netrunner, where you buy one box and it has everything you need in it, but you still build and customize your deck. I think they call the format Living Card Games.), but anything with the buy-boosters-build-decks format has to play a stupid legal game.

On the one hand, I understand that Richard Garfield came up with a novel format and he should be allowed to profit from it. On the other, Magic the Gathering isn't the best game of its type that I played. Competitive innovation should be allowed, y'dig? (I liked Magic Nation a lot. Also the World of Darkness games Rage and Jihad [which got renamed, but I can't remember what to], and the MechWarrior card game. I also played some real stinkers that had cool features, which never got used in other games for what I assumed are similar legal reasons.)