It is easy to say that you lost the game because you drew too many or too few lands. It is very difficult to say that you lost because of a mistake with your mulligan, a specific important play or even in deckbuilding or metagaming. The land system gets a bad rap for bad play imo
Magic is the best TCG game partially because of the initial decision about the resource system. Mana is just hard to beat.
The other part is it being the first TCG, but I don't think it is because it attracted players first, but because it attracted best designers first.
1/5