Yeah, magic here in Brazil was giant back in 1996... Today only some people continue. The people sealing Magic never really tried to build something on magic... they just sold as hell... Maybe they tried but failed because didn't do a good job.
Championship was never big... to much disinformation back in the day... Internet was a dream back in those days...
Today, with the internet, things would have been different.. I am sure more people would have remained playing.
Besides that, the price never was good enough.. Instead of 2 dollars for a booster, we pay the equivalent of 7 dollars for the same, with bad translation to portuguese.
I actually don't really care about having to wait 2 or 3 weeks.. It doesn't matter for me.
I just wanted to be able to pay less to be able to play the standard constructed tournaments.. I have mostly cards from 1996... so even if there were Vintage and Legacy tournaments here in Brazil, I wouldn't have a good enough deck because I don't have cards from alpha, beta, unlimited, and revised.
Maybe I'll try to buy just the cards to build my deck to play in standard in the future. Right now I'll just play the sealed deck M2012 for fun...