by Justice Menzel
Have you checked your attic in the past few years? Try shining a flashlight on those childhood trading cards—they could be worth a lot more than you think.
From the early 1990s to the turn of the 20th Century, there's this Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon Trading Card Game, and Yu-Gi-Oh! exploded onto a scene previously dominated by sports cards, whose bubble had begun to burst. Starting with Magic, each captured the hearts and wallets of a more diverse group of consumers interested in the products’ unique two-pronged allure as limited collectibles and playable game pieces, according to Dr. Corey Williams, an assistant professor of Economics at Shippensburg University.
We tend to think of sports cards as the real golden geese, with the faces of Honus Wagner and Mickey Mantle often being paired at auction houses with estimates in the millions of dollars. But in recent years, a few game-based trading cards have risen to meteoric prices in time for the millennial generation’s bank accounts to keep up. In 2023, Rapper Post Malone purchased Magic: The Gathering’s 1-of-1 “The One Ring” card for $2.6 million, while internet celebrity and boxer Logan Paul bought a 1998 mint-graded “Illustrator Pikachu” from the Pokémon TCG at $5.256 million in 2022.
Although cards’ monetary value can be predicated on collectability in these exceptional cases, it mostly derives from their position as objectively better deck-building tools within their respective games. “If it’s like chess, you could imagine that if you had an entire board where everything is a queen, you’re going to do very well compared to someone who has an entire board of pawns,” says Dr. Williams, who moonlights as a Magic: The Gathering judge.
Competitive play, although only accounting for a small portion of consumers, largely discerns what cards are in demand. But even this is not static: cards vying for supremacy in the competitive ‘metagame’ frequently change as new ones are printed and old ones are reprinted or banned. Williams gave a recent example in “Jeweled Lotus,” a powerful Magic: The Gathering card which, during May of 2024, was valued at more than $100, but following a September ban announcement by Wizards of the Coast, fell 70% in value despite its inherent rarity and diminutive reprints.
This volatility makes for a chaotic investment vehicle that Williams cautioned against: “You’d be misguided to throw your money into cards that can easily be reprinted [or banned] to the moon and back.” Some collectors have found greater success in sealed products, like booster boxes and packs, or graded cards, whose market values are often positively correlated with age and relative scarcity. For instance, a 1996 Pokémon Base Set booster box, containing 24 sealed booster packs, can be worth $150,000, depending on print run and condition.
At high levels of competition, some make a small fortune. Russell Laparre is a Virginia Beach native, who, since childhood, has played competitively in various games, accumulating, to date, what he estimates to be about $80,000 in tournament winnings. Top prizing in the recently developed One Piece Card Game, which Laparre transitioned to after a long career in the Pokémon TCG, generally ranges from values in the $10,000 to $20,000 range for eight hours of play. He is aware of high school-aged “Pokémon players who have already paid off their college by winning tournaments.” Centering much of his life around the TCG community, he met his now-wife at a Pokémon tournament in Dallas, Texas.
On a smaller scale, players and collectors require reliable sourcing of products, which can be provided by general retailers, but is more often fulfilled by local game shops. Comic Kings, a Virginia Beach location, opened in the early ‘90s with a focus on sports cards and comic books.
After thirty years in business, its owner, Joey Boyack, says to “listen to your customers.” He began diversifying the shop’s offerings around the release of Magic: The Gathering, tuning his store to new clientele and new trends: beanie babies, action figures, and eventually, trading card games, which now make up about 50% of the store’s yearly revenue.
Williams, however, says that local game stores like Comic Kings often have difficulty widening profits: “The hardest part for a lot of game stores are the margins you make on sealed products you get from your distributor, like sealed booster boxes. They’re very minuscule.” Williams explained that while these stores have developed a method of buying individual cards, called singles, back from their clientele to sell at a markup, they aren’t able to accumulate inventory quickly enough to grow the business beyond its locality.
The COVID-19 pandemic saw the most dramatic increase in demand and popularity for all trading card games since the outset of Pokémania, a term coined to describe the period directly after the English localization of Pokémon and its products. “Prices were super inflated over COVID,” says Williams, “there was a mix of people that were just looking for something else to invest in, but also a strong mix of people that were new to the game[s] because of COVID’s economic shift.”
Boyack saw a similar trend, “COVID doubled everything we ever did from back in the ‘90s, and it’s still the same way. Then, I sold 1000 booster packs in a week. Now, the demand is so high… I can [sometimes] sell 200 booster boxes in four hours.”
In the years following the COVID surge, Magic: The Gathering became a billion-dollar franchise for Wizards of the Coast’s parent company, Hasbro. Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, with $12.1 billion of its estimated revenue being ascribed to its trading card game.
Sports players may come and go, but Pikachu can’t retire.
Photos and images: Courtesy of Comic Kings Facebook, and The Pokémon Company International Press Site