Over the last year, two trading card games have received levels of attention never seen before in their decades-long histories. Both Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering have become more popular than ever, with both franchises selling out of new product so routinely that it’s become normal to not be able to find any packs in any stores. Rather than attempting to ramp up production to meet these additional demands, both companies appear to be leaning in, encouraging the scarcity with ever-more-desirable and underproduced sets, for significant short-term gains. However, I contend this focus on the frenzy has a massive cost: the regular players. And when a generation of kids simply cannot buy the cards they need to build a deck, the long-term losses could be brutal.
If you’ve got some disposable income and are a collector of pretty cardboard, times are great. Those able to afford scalpers’ fees or the booming secondhand market can pick up some all-time best-looking cards in both series, with Pokémon’s ever-more-beautiful full-art cards routinely fetching $500 in resales and Magic‘s waterfall of tie-in expansion sets from some of the most popular properties in entertainment selling out before most people even learn they’re on sale. You know who this isn’t helping? People who actually play Pokémon TCG or Magic: The Gathering.
Right now, where I live in the UK, the only way I can get a pack of Pokémon cards released in the last 12 months is by making it my job to write about them and having them sent to me directly by The Pokémon Company. This is clearly not a path open to all. At the same time, I routinely pop into both specialist card stores and larger retailers to see if I can get anything from November 2024’s Surging Sparks onward, let alone the most recent sets, and usually find they have nothing at all. In the last week I’ve noticed justifiably unloved Temporal Forces packs from March ’24 showing up here and there, and that’s my lot. If I wanted to be playing in live games with the current meta, I’d now have to resort to buying even bulk cards from resellers.
Meanwhile, over at Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering, it’s no better. Where once the game would release occasional spin-off sets based on other media properties for a fun treat, the card game is now dominated by an ever-growing number of “legal” cards from other universes, not least the Final Fantasy sets. And boy oh boy, they’ve been a scalper’s paradise too. Then there was July’s Sonic-themed debacle, as well as the impossibility of finding Lord of the Rings packs. This is only going to get weirder, now that Universes Beyond sets will be legal in all Constructed formats. This is going to include such exceptionally un-Magic licenses as Spider-Man, Star Trek and, er, Dwight from The Office? The result of this is obviously that the sets are attracting collectors over and above players, bringing in the people looking to pull the rarest, most interesting art to put in a binder. And good on ’em—I rarely play Pokémon TCG any more now that my kid’s lost interest, but I still love my binders. But there’s a consequence.
I worry for the players. If you can’t just buy the packs, you can’t play the game. And given both companies appear to be not only doing nothing to improve the situation, but going out of their way to make it worse, this will surely have a long-term impact on the products in the future? Your adult collectors today were likely kids or teenagers playing in the past, and when those adults cut out the next generation of kids, that pipeline springs a very significant leak.
In Pokémon‘s latest set, Mega Evolution, the company has chosen to include two cards so rare they only appear in one out of every 2,520 packs, which of course is driving even more frenzied interest toward the cards when they’ve already been close to impossible to buy for nearly a year. Repeated promises from The Pokémon Company to increase production either haven’t been honored or haven’t made a meaningful difference, and a move like this really underlines just how uninvested it is in making things any better. Meanwhile, Wizards of the Coast appears to be chasing the same results with its Secret Lair drops that sell out in minutes and leave so many people disappointed, with the company adding more spin-off sets this and next year than in multiple previous years combined.
And yes, absolutely, these companies don’t care! If it’s a scalper or a five-year-old buying the products, the money fills up their bank just the same. But I suspect they are going to care when interest drops off considerably in the next five to ten years, after a generation who was cut off from being able to access the games reaches an age when they’ve got spending money. It’s what my friend Paul describes as “Funkopopping” their brands. They’re forgetting that all the little words written on those cards have a purpose beyond making the pictures harder to enjoy.
Who knows, maybe time will prove me wrong, and both companies’ emphatic leaning on driving short-term buzz will work out for them, and I’ll look like a big old idiot. But I do suspect otherwise. Pokémon‘s disappearance into a scalper-driven secondhand market is a terrible look for the company, even if it pushes up their profits in the moment, while MtG‘s watering down of its own universe to become some Fortnite-like mash-up of contemporary culture seems like such a short-sighted cash-grab. And none of it benefits the group of misfit kids who find company and kindness in sitting around a table, playing the games. And that sucks.
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