You might not be playing your favorite cards or commanders, as pet cards are usually replaced with cards needed in the meta, but you're playing what you think will be most likely to win
The Painter's Studio side at 2R offers the typical red card advantage formula, exiling the top two cards and letting you play them until end of next turn
While I still have some reservations, I find the D&D crossovers a lot easier to reconcile with Magics aesthetic (as I likely will with the Lord of the Rings set, and I am sure I would have were this set of precons focused on Warhammer Fantasy Battles, or even Age of Sigmar)
Then there was this thread, where a collector had spent an entire morning re-homing their collection into a new binder, only to find the pages wouldn't lie flat and their cards were already at risk of warping
There have been some really amazing cards printed over the years.
As your creatures die, your opponents will each lose a life, including the creatures that bit it when this arrived at the battlefield