The secondary market has always been a big part of trading cards and trading card games. Without a stable one, many card games will and have died with collectors and players simply not interested with the sealed pack. However, the idea of the secondary market is rarely respected by a good amount of the player base in trading card games specifically, as card aren’t just collectibles, they are also game pieces, and when cards start approaching $100+ for a staple, powerful card that is an almost necessary part of decks in a format. The three major TCG’s, Pokemon, Magic: The Gathering, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, all try to balance the secondary market along with those who are solely play the game in different ways.
Trading Cards first came into being in the 1860s as baseball cards. However, they were nothing like the current day iteration. For one, they were released with packs of cigarettes and two, there was a lack of rarity distribution meaning that every card had the same rate of being pulled which made desired cards influenced by a player’s performance. Trading cards then evolved with the introduction of booster packs. Booster packs were individually sold packs of 5-10 cards and introduced a rarity distribution system. Every card had it own artificial rarity set by the manufacturer which truly allowed the secondary market to form.
Almost every TCG uses this format of card distribution, with major differences between how each card game uses them and how that affects what cards are expensive in the secondary market. Yu-Gi-Oh! of the major games has the most simple way of structuring their rarity and is probably the worst example to follow. Cards can have 5 main rarities common, super rare, ultra rare, secret rare, and quarter century secret rare(QCR rare). Each card in the set can have only one rarity, with the exception of ultra and secret which are also sometimes can come as a QCR rare, which is where the problems start. Because there needs to be an incentive to open up packs of cards what ends up happening is that a handful of good cards get put into the higher rarities which starts funneling both collectors and the player of the game to want the same cards driving up price for certain cards as high as $140, and while not every card has this high of a price these outlier cards can add up with decks having a prices as high as $1000 for competitive decks with the lower tier decks, that perform well, still costing around $200. To aid with this every year or so Yu-Gi-Oh! prints out a reprint set so that highly sought after staple cards to that most people are able to get them at a good price. This may be doing more harm than good in some cases. These reprint sets usually end up lowering the price of the original cards by a lot which is good as in the long run the older version usually does get more expensive than the reprint version. Though this ends up leading to repetitive cycle where a powerful card is printed and costs a lot only for it to be reprinted later and crash the price of it, and if it’s a problematic cards banned three months later after the price isn’t as high anymore. These price problems are only worsened by the extreme power creep the game suffers due to a lack of set rotation.
On the other hand, Magic: The Gathering tensions between collectors and player doesn’t stem from new cards, but rather older ones. This is mainly due to the reserved list. The reserved list, created in 1996 three years after Magic’s release, details rare cards released in early that Wizards Of The Coast (WOTC), the company behind Magic, promised to never reprint with the only change to the list being in 2002 where all common and uncommon cards were removed.from the reserved list. Reserved list was put in place as a for WOTC to guarantee players that their old cards won’t lose value on the secondary market, while it can be argued if that wouldn’t have happen as long as WOTC made later printing look different, the effect it is has had on legacy formats is massive. Many cards in Magic’s first sets are game-warping powerful and because they were located at only higher rarities they prices for these cards are extremely high. However, unlike Yu-Gi-Oh!, Magic as a game doesn’t suffer as much from these good cards being expensive. For one, Magic’s premier format is “standard” which only allows cards released in the past 2 years to be played meaning magic’s main competitive focus is on a much cheaper format. Though decks are still expensive with good ones usually ranging from $200-$500. The second is that Magic’s most popular format is “Commander” is casual focused format, and while a few cards that are on the reserved are playable in the format due to the format not having many officially sanctioned events. Because of this one of the best cost-saving measures is allowed to be used the format, “proxies”. Simply put they are just cards made to represent different cards this combined with WOTC indifference to them as long as the event isn’t officially sanctioned creates a easy way to play these powerful cards provided your playgroup is okay with that.
Finally, the Pokémon TCG probably deals with the fact that it is both a collector’s hobby and game the best out of the big three games. Competitive decks in Pokémon are very rarely over $100. This is because of the way Pokémon manages rarities. Unlike the previous two card games mentioned above Pokémon has seven different rarities and the lower three rarities contain every card in the set. Meanwhile, at the upper four rarities are just cards with different illustration and “full-arts.” By making sure that every card that is a “full-art” has a much cheaper budget version Pokémon is able to cater to the collectors of the game and the players at the same time without having one or the other feel left out and unwanted.
