Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat.

Today I wanted to ramble on an interesting aspect of collectible card games and that is the very presence and existence of them is an interesting paradox.

I wanted to talk about what makes collectible card games something interesting as a game and as a collectible in a way that is interesting, and hopefully coherent.

Game Without a Box

The very idea of a collectible card game being a viable way for a game to be made wasn’t something that was really thought of.

There had been card games before, games using a traditional deck of cards like poker and blackjack as well as games using their own custom cards like Uno have existed long before collectible card games, but what made a game like Magic succeed?

Having listened to several episodes of Magic’s Head Designer Mark Rosewater’s podcast Drive to Work and his affinity for the history of the game, what he says Richard Garfield was going for when making the game was that it was a “game without a box.”

This meant that the game didn’t have all of the pieces straightaway, but it was still a game that could be played even if you didn’t have every single piece. You can pick and choose what pieces of the game you liked and played with those and other players can do the same, but they are all tied together by the base rules of the game.

Using cards as the avenue for the game was also interesting because the concept of trading cards has existed for well over a century, it just took a while for people to attach a game to it.

The “Paradox”

This is where my idea that collectible card games have a sort of “paradox” attached to them.

It’s no secret that people buy cards from places other than official products, they buy single cards from other vendors so they can make the deck that they want to make.

This means that the cards have a value to them, which makes sense since they are collectible, but the value of that card diminishes over time the more the card is played. Even with sleeves and knowledge of taking care of your cards improving massively over the years, cards that are played will lose some value the worse condition they are.

Some people then choose not to play with their cards and decide to keep them in a place where they can appreciate their cards and maintain a high value if they decide to sell them in the future.

However, this means that even if they have this cool card they can show around, they can’t really play with it at the risk of the card becoming damaged. You could choose to proxy the card, which would be fine in most casual situations, but if you want to participate in official events, you’ll need to play with the actual cards.

This is where the crossroads of being a player and a collector divide and is the “paradox”: do you buy cards to play with knowing they’ll lose value or to collect knowing that you can’t really play with them.

Some people don’t care about the value of the card and just want to play with the best cards and some people only care about the value of the cards and will do anything they can to protect that value.

Players vs. Collectors

This divide of players and collectors is something that still haunts card games today in many forms.

Going by one of the classic examples of a player and collector divide is the Reserved List in Magic the Gathering. In brief, the Reserved List is a series of old cards that will never be reprinted in any form, either as the original card is or as a functional reprint.

This was done at the time to help maintain the value of cards after some collectors complained that Wizards of the Coast was reprinting too many cards. It stopped having cards added to it starting with the set Mercadian Masques and has been a point of contention for years.

Many people, like myself, want the Reserved List to be gone so there is a chance for these cards to be reprinted since many of them are not great cards and are hampered by the fact that they are on the Reserved List that is keeping them prohibitively expensive.

There are other people, however, that want to keep the Reserved List because it was something that Wizards promised they would keep and that people have spent a lot of money on and will spend a lot of money on in the future, plus there is potential legal ramifications if Wizards does reprint cards on the Reserved List.

It is the primary example of the player vs. collector conflict, but this affects other games too. When Lorcana was first being released, it was hard to get a box of the first set for a while, mostly because collectors and scalpers saw a Disney card game and figured that they should get on the ground early to buy a box and hold onto it as an “investment”.

Harmony

The reason why I use “paradox” in quotes so often is that the player vs. collector issue is that it really isn’t much of a problem as some would make it out to be.

There are many people who collect and play with expensive cards while also acknowledging that they won’t carry as much value in the future, but can still sell them for a decent price.

While there are some issues that the collectible aspect of card games have introduced, it isn’t the end of the world. People can spend their money however they want and can do whatever they want with whatever they buy.

If that means playing an unsleeved Black Lotus on the side walk or buying the latest copy of Giant Growth to get it slabbed, collectible card games are an interesting “paradox.”

Thank you for reading, see you all next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual