Off course they take money from you if you buy trading card games. I play Magic, but I barelly ever trade em, I only use em to play the actuall game.
I only trade something when I see something someone else has that I want in my deck. And that's occured about 3 times in 2 years.
If you only traded 3 cards in 2 years, you're probably playing very casual magic. When I was playing Magic (I have restarted it last month), we had to buy and trade cards every time a new expansion came out, which was 4 times a year. And we're talking about trading a total of 30 or 40 cards each time here. If you didn't do this, you were eaten alive by the decent decks.
Unless you played white wheenie with cheap cards like me. I have this cool deck that doubles in verocity each time one of the better cards comes into play. It also costs $20 to get all the cards...
Well, not necessarily, you can buy tons from every new expansion and thus not needing to trade cards.
I won most of my cards via competition winning (free booster boxes, whee) so I could build most of my decks for free, and if I ever needed anything I would just get the cards individually.
As for white weenie, I was never a fan of it. For that matter I never liked mono-colored decks, kinda easy to predict overall. Black/Green or Blue/White/Green decks for me.
Uhm.. Pokemon cards, I once bought a booster pack out of curiosity, and managed to pull some 1st edition Charizard and some dude bought it from me for like 600 euro.