[nekusar]

People are also leaving out stuff like Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh, and Magic The Gathering.

All of them also introduce rarities (arbitrary exclusiveness), hidden cards in a pack, and extreme gambling gamification.

The only non-gambling MtG packs are the preconstructed commander decks. All 100 cards are published. But the packs and boxes? Pure gambling, especially for the chase rare cards.

And before anyone asks, yes, my username is based after this $2 card. https://edhrec.com/commanders/nekusar-the-mindrazer

[asdff]

I feel like it only became rampant in recent years. As a 90s kid no one cared about the card packs. We all assumed they'd be junk cards and a waste of $7 or whatever. No, the move for card people back then was to wait for the card show and just buy the cards you actually want from a card dealer.

The thing is now people are marketing the pack opening. You have social media accounts of them pulling cards from packs and getting all hyped up about it. Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s but thats because the unboxing as an experience wasn't marketed by anyone at all. People just wanted cards they thought were personally cool in some way.

And likewise expansion of markets in the internet era means people start to have shared values of what is a valuable card based on market price vs just being interested in some certain cards out of your own interest.

[rurp]

I don't know, in the 90s a bunch of friends and I were into MtG and everyone bought packs. The idea of buying from a card dealer instead wasn't even on our radar. We weren't the most hardcore players but I think we were pretty typical; we went to Comic Con a few times in that era.

[FarmerPotato]

Consider who your peers were then. Were they likely to get addicted? I know my circle was elite--doing the probability calculations, circulating card lists on Usenet, and joking that gambling was taxes on stupid people.

Now as an adult, I see tweens with addictions to multiple things. Watch them beg to buy a Pokemon pack, open it, and lose interest. It's completely the dopamine expectation. And it takes years in recovery. But I think I was ignorant and unaware in the 90s of what other people were addicted to.

[strken]

In the early to mid 2000s we used to do MTG booster drafts at the local game shop. Maybe the experience was different for different people.

[lurk2]

> Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s

How old was everyone in the 1990s? Kids loved this kind of thing in the 2000s.

[rufus_foreman]

>> the move for card people back then was to wait for the card show and just buy the cards you actually want from a card dealer

That's still the move. Unless you want to gamble.

[belkinpower]

The Pokémon card mania in particular is deeply weird to me. I play Magic at a local card shop a few times a month and it’s always full of people playing Magic, D&D, or various board games. I don’t think I’ve seen a single person playing the Pokémon card game. So who’s buying the valuable singles? What’s keeping the market afloat? It’s bizarre.

[lnrd]

It's a collector's market, the value is in the demand and scarcity. Same as with all other collectibles like baseball cards and such. Or even wines, there are some that are so old they become undrinkable but cost like a car. In collectors market the price is detached from any kind of purpose of the item.

Also consider that most Magic cards are also valuable only because of their collector status. The valuable ones are mint first editions and nobody is buying them to play them.

So who fuels this collectors market? Nostalgic 30-something that have now disposable income and want to buy things they wanted as children. Same as with videogames collectors and such. You don't need an original copy of Supermario to play it, but people still spend thousands to buy it.

[musicale]

Pokémon TCG seems to have turned into a contest among opportunistic resellers to see who can buy up all of the cards and sell them to ... collectors? Other resellers? Who knows?

Which is a shame, since the game itself is actually fun. Or it would be if you could buy the cards easily and cheaply.

[asdff]

People in their 30s and 40s. It is the same thing with boomers and comic books. What was once in mass circulation in your childhood is now out of print and commanding real value among your nostalgic peers.

[squigz]

My guess is literally just the people who trade them - and maybe like, 10 13 year olds.

[jparishy]

Sports, too. Recent post from the President of Upper Deck talking about it: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jmash_everything-speculative-...

[squigz]

I think there's a massive difference between card packs - which have been as you describe for decades - and the recent boom in sports betting. Most people don't even know what MTG is, or that there's even a market for those cards. Everyone now knows that you can bet on any sport you want - and if some reports are to be believed, a large percentage of people are participating.

Anyway, this is why I play MTG online - same with 40k, although there's no gambling there. Just too expensive to play either IRL even if I wanted to.

[TheCapeGreek]

> Anyway, this is why I play MTG online

I think this depends on how you interact with your chosen game. To me, I play Yugioh as a hobby. If I'm "only" into the digital versions of the game, then it's no different to playing just about any other video game.

And even then, these live service TCGs (outside of unofficial simulators) can often have the same lootbox/pack gambling aspects as the real thing.

Personally that's not what I want. A good chunk of why I play paper is because of the physical community, in a space outside my home.

[banannaise]

> I think there's a massive difference between card packs - which have been as you describe for decades - and the recent boom in sports betting.

There is, until there isn't. MTG has been leaning drastically into tiered and ultra-premium products. Increasingly, it feels like Magic design and product is focused on extracting money from the whales at the price of hollowing out their playerbase.

It's difficult to draw a hard line between wholesome collecting and lootbox gambling, but it's hard not to notice that even the bastions of the collectible industry have been aggressively moving in the direction of the latter.

[uses]

As a Magic player, yeah some people definitely have a compulsive addictive gambling relationship with the product. And Wizards has been leaning into that recently with more rare versions of mechanically identical cards.

However, you can buy sealed product to both build your collection and get cards to trade. And the main reason for sealed to exist, ostensibly, is limited.

And a lot of people don't interact with the "gambling" aspect at all. I'm very deep into magic after 10 years, and I almost exclusively buy singles and do prereleases. I might buy like 10 random packs total in an entire year.

[TimByte]

The randomness is marketed as part of the fun, but for a lot of players (especially younger ones), it taps into the same reward-loop psychology as slot machines

[mnky9800n]

I used to really enjoy magic. Then at some point I couldn’t keep up with the constructed meta. So I switched to drafting. But now it seems like everything is so gamified that playing the game isn’t enough anymore. Now you need to play all the time both in the shop and on mtg arena and it’s like designed to keep you hooked. I hate it. I really just can’t be bothered to play anymore. It’s no longer fun it’s just a grind.

[nicce]

> It’s no longer fun it’s just a grind.

Like most new games these days. I play only old games or few special ones like Baldur’s Gate anymore.

[tayo42]

Why does drafting feel like that?

[rs186]

Why not mention blind boxes and Labubu

I never understand why people "collect" these things

[hobofan]

Labubus are much less about collectior value. They are more like a wearable luxury item that's sold via a gambling mechanic.

Their value is much less speculative and much more closely based on (blindbox price * distribution percentage of the rare variants) than most of the other items being dicussed here.

[gnopgnip]

There is a big difference with a physical product. It’s harder to get in over your head and go bankrupt

[hshdhdhehd]

And Robinhood etc.?