Livre d'Or

Dominion has none of the downsides of Magic: The Gathering. It took me a little while to learn but after the first few games, I usually find that it plays in no more than 20 minutes. I wouldn't be surprised if it had been deliberately designed to be like Magic without the annoying aspects. You don't need to buy (or memorize) thousands of cards and you don't lose because your opponent has more money to spend on rares than you do. Expansions exist but the base game (20 cards) is really fun on its own and in my experience has years worth of replayability without having to buy any extra cards. Also the cards are far less complicated than most Magic ones, you can easily understand how they work just by reading them without needing a zillion edge case rules. It condenses the deckbuilding element of MtG down to something that just happens naturally over the course of the game, no advance planning needed, and even a total beginner can usually get something that works.I thoroughly recommend Dominion, it really is a good bits only version of Magic: the Gathering.

Playing online: come and join us at Yucata! It's a really lovely board gaming site, mostly German in culture, and explicitly set up to play asynchronous games. It's free as in beer; they ask for donations but don't nag at all and there is no downside to being a free user. And it has over 100 games, about 90% of which are high quality Eurogames; they've thought carefully about what is actually suited to the format, so eg they don't have games with a lot of trading and haggling, since those don't really work asynchronously. Also they get explicit permission from the game publishers for every game they offer on their site, so you don't need to feel guilty about playing the games without buying them. My user name there is ewerb, but my experience has been that playing with strangers is always pleasant, it has a very friendly culture where people are there for the games, not to win and not to be abusive to other players.