In competitive gaming, the gaming items that players use in competition is constantly changing. The current state of that collective knowledge is called, "the meta." If you imagine a bunch of people playing rock, paper, scissors, and 50% of people play rock then over time people will start playing paper more. Other players will respond to the new paper players with more scissors, and so on. The shift in distribution from session to session is the meta.
What is interesting about this in a game like Magic is it shifts the economics of player collections along with the movement of the meta. Since this shift happens a posteriori, and is done by the players, there is a robust after market for cards that has spawned a whole ecosystem of gaming stores, and community spaces for players.
And that's cool.
And so when I started thinking about digital things being traded around and stuff this was the model I wanted to pursue, but I wanted to do three things: 1) I wanted a way for people to acquire the digital things for free (this, incidentally is what WotC did by releasing Magic Arena, which is free-to-play), 2) make it as easy as possible for the digital things to represent as many things as possible, and 3) and most importantly, make sure it was interoperable between games so that multiple metas would be lending value to people's collections.
Getting game developers to actually use this didn't quite work five years ago, but we keep grindin'.