So... Most of the cards that compose the affinity deck are Modern legal. Only the really broken ones are banned.
And the lands that made Ravager Affinity so powerful in Standard.
Yeah. The lands were the kicker of the mod, really, but there are still pseudo-artifact lands that double as bodies, although it costs mana to do it. Blinkmoth and Inkmoth Nexus. Means the deck is a bit slower, but not terribly slower, than it was way back when.
Artifact lands in the same block as Affinity was simply a BAD idea. Like, a terribad idea. How could they not foresee the abuse? For real, WoTC does somethings sometimes that can only be justifiable as market plays. They release an über powerful card they know is going to get banned/restricted, but before it is, it creates a huge drive of booster pack sales and general interest in the expansion. Mythic Rares exacerbated this problem even further. Shit, Big Jace peaked at 200$ at some point. That's insane for a Standard card. Stuff like this is killing the metagame, i swear.
I was driven away from Magic for financial reasons. I couldn't keep up that hobby and all of my others, i could only choose to keep all the others, or finance my Magic play. Nowadays it's pretty rare to have a reasonable-cost Standard deck, although everyone keeps trying to. It gets harder and harder to justify having massive expenditure after every 2 or 3 months when new expansions come up and new ideas are thrown in, especially considering that you're not only buying the cards as singles, but also buying packs and boxes, and that adds up fast. In the end you're forced into casual play, which is not nearly as entertaining as keeping to the tournament level play, which gets competitive and costly even at city levels.
I try and get the same enjoyment out of playing online, but i find it to be simply impossible to replicate the feeling. It's one of those games that just have to get physical, you need to be able to touch and feel the cards, buy the high quality plastic casings, buy specialized storage, take care and maintain your collection, even though it's not a complete collection nor it will ever be, but in the end you keep getting attached to your cards.
How i miss 10 years ago when it was much more reasonably priced and i didn't know quite enough about it and enjoyed the casual play much more
The mechanic in general is problematic. There are many variations on the deck type, but the most efficient kill-con is Ravager/Disciple two-fer-1. Alternates include various metalcraft direct damage spells and pinging with light hitters in quantity, while using the utility to keep your opponent locked down. Ravager as an enabler to Disciple is especially devious, but there are a lot of other approaches. Disciple is more of a core card than Ravager is, because the Ravager is more of an enabler to Disciple, but it adds another kill con by itself and is really cost efficient, so the two were born for each other. The reason why it was problematic back then was because it was a block where there wasn't a lot of mana acceleration, and it was an artifact focused mod, with a mechanic that heavily favored heavy artifact decks, meaning abuse was to follow.