To my mind, the top echelon of trading card games, really only MtG and Pokémon, have a different economy. The games are actively played and people do make a liv

To my mind, the top echelon of trading card games, really only MtG and Pokémon, have a different economy. The games are actively played and people do make a living by furnishing the card market, as well as the organized playing market. I don’t have a description of the exact mechanism, but I think the greater liquidity caused by changes in the meta game, and therefore which cards are valuable at any given moment, lends confidence to the earlier cards. MtG is further unique, at least insofar as I understand it, that a class of the earliest cards still see play in organized tournaments and are generally very powerful. Pokémon doesn’t seem to enjoy this same phenomenon, but I guess the games perpetuate the nostalgia for certain items in the first edition. This is why I never understood sports cards. The literally have no utility, which is fine in itself, but I cannot see how this does anything other than produce a few highly valuable artifacts of the cultural phenomenon that is sports. I actually think that the major sports league should create an ever green strategy game, to which the collectibles are inextricably linked as game pieces. Then again, they already generate so much revenue, and they would not be good at all at designing a game, so I suppose anything derived from licensing is simply gravy.