By: Andy Gao
Post Malone, the famous rapper, has recently bought a one-of-a-kind card from the tabletop card game, Magic: The Gathering for $2 million.
This is the first time a card from Magic has crossed the seven-figure mark, as the game is not as popular as other trading cards like Pokémon. This purchase has contributed to a trend in recent years that made game cards as popular as sports cards.
Baseball cards are some of the most popular collectibles around the world. Many people are comparing the rise of Magic cards to the rise of baseball cards. “It’s kind of like the first time a baseball card ever sold for a million dollars,” said Ken Goldin, a longtime sports memorabilia collector and owner of Goldin Auctions.
“To all of the tens of millions of collectors in the world who collect Magic: The Gathering, it basically has solidified their collection and says ‘Hey, this is serious business.'” (NPR, 2023)
Magic’s trading cards have become wildly successful, and the pandemic played a huge role in their success. Many people were finding their old Pokémon, Yu-gi-oh!, and Magic cards and getting them appraised. This has left backlogs at popular authentication companies.
Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) is a major authentication company that inspects cards for their condition, printing, and coloring. Each card is given a grade, which is required for auctions on 3rd party sites like eBay. The higher the grade, the higher the price.
According to GemRate, a company that tracks grading activity, the PSA graded more than 514,000 cards in July from TCG, the company responsible for many collectible cards. That’s more than five times the amount of game cards PSA graded only two years ago.
Influencers are also contributing to the success of game cards. Logan Paul, a WWE wrestler and YouTube star, brought a rare Pikachu card for over $5 million, a record purchase. Following this, a spike was noticed in the PSA grading activity.
“It moves it from being like a child thing to something that’s a little bit culturally meaningful,” stated Ryan Stuczynski, the founder of GemRate. (NPR, 2023
There are certain downsides to the sudden boost in trading cards. In a partnership between Magic: The Gathering partnership with Lord of the Rings, Hasbro, the maker of Magic, has started to create one-of-one, limited-edition collectible cards. This idea follows sports cards by introducing artificial scarcity with rare cards.
Hasbro has gained $100 million in product sales from the new limited-edition cards. “It’s gonna lead manufacturers to do more unusual items like the ring card,” Goldin said.
Adding artificial scarcity into the market, limited-edition cards have promoted inflated pricing and pulling down card values for ordinary cards. “If something is being produced for the sole purpose of being a collectible, it’s less likely that it is going to be valuable over the years, as opposed to something that wasn’t intended to be a collectible and just happened to be,” explained Goldin. Baseball cards, for example, were not originally meant to be collectibles, he added. (NPR, 2023)
The rapid introduction of new cards has interfered with the reason fans started to buy the cards: the gameplay. “The quantity of new cards, the confusion of a billion different arts for each card, and the complexity creep on cards that do 17 different things have all made it hard for me to keep up with [Magic: The Gathering]” one Reddit user wrote. (NPR, 2023)
But the new cards will not stop consumers from buying these cards for collectibles. This trend has shot game cards to be equal to sports cards, and it appears to be continuing.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/08/1192404827/mitg-pokemon-game-card-collecting