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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

"cards collected by children and hobbyists."

Do children still collect these cards?

Not really. The idea of collectable cards that you can't do anything with is antiquated. Ever since Magic: The Gathering came along, kids who are interested in collecting (Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, whatever) want to do more with cards than look at them in a binder.

Pokemon cards, especially rare ones, are as big as ever, possibly bigger since a certain brand of influencers have taken an interest. As ever, you can buy them in pretty much any applicable shop in the UK. Match Attax and other football cards are still going very healthily

I don't know or know of a child who is interested in Magic: The Gathering. Their target market is more like late teens and young adults.

If you want a more accurate usurper to trading cards, you're best looking at things like Fifa Ultimate Team[1] - which, honestly, have missed a trick in not branching into physical cards - and Skylanders. Possibly also collecting skins on Fortnite and that kind of thing

[1] a sort of virtual card-collecting football game made by EA where you open packs of cards containing football players and other items

I stupidly got into FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) in one of the games from a cellphone couple years ago. I mistakenly assumed that your team from one annual release of FIFA would carry over to the next release, but I was shocked to find out that this isn't the case. EA basically deletes players FUT progress every year! Thankfully I didn't spend any money on it, so it was just time spent which was at least kind of fun, but I know some friends who have sunk a couple hundred bucks into it and they continue to buy and play the next game. I'm baffled that people put up with this. I will never touch FIFA again, until this changes. At least Fanatics can't delete your trading cards and you can resell them. Until there are similar guarantees for digital items, I don't think they will have nearly the same appeal. Valve has been the only company I know of that has done this decently with TF2, CSGO and Dota 2 skins.

I think the issue you have is real, but perhaps not quite in the way you think? if you have the full game on a console/PC, you can continue to play with your team from the previous year until maybe 3 or 4 years on when they turn off the servers, and all your work is lost forever. that's the thing I have an issue with. I'd love to go back and play with my teams from FIFA 13 or 15, but they're lost to the wind, or at least somewhere within EA's archives, at best

Your issue is an issue with the way they implement the app, which has always been a bit of an afterthought to the main game in general. Still a valid issue and must have been extremely annoying, but I suspect your case might be quite unusual in that you came into it via the app, rather than the main title. however admittedly I'm not as au fait with the FIFA world as I used to be, so that may be more common than I assume

I play M:TG with my 10 year old son and have done for a couple of years. I know of another family with boys roughly the same age who also play.

Baseball cards had a use when, ya know, the internet and even things like printed annual references, either didn’t exist or would not have been affordable to the average kid.

yeah and, strangely, part of the value in a legendary player's "rookie card" is that it's devoid of all that useful information, because nobody at the time knew yet how good (say) Homer Simpson would be in his career

Weirdly enough, every anecdote I've heard about Pokemon cards is that they are collected far more than played, and that most people who own them don't know how the game works.

I'm surprised that someone hasn't created a sports-themed collectible card game that uses real players for the roster.

One of the real magic things about Madden as a videogame is that it has the same teams and players you know, with stats intended to reflect their real-world performance. The result is that you can take all of the sports knowledge you already have in your head from being into football and know that knowledge materially makes you better at this videogame.

Seems like you could do the same thing for a collectible card game and make a mint.

> I'm surprised that someone hasn't created a sports-themed collectible card game that uses real players for the roster.

IIRC, they did for all the major (in the US) professional sports at the height of the CCG craze; one example was MLB Showdown: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLB_Showdown

It would be nice if anyone could just do that, but the leagues have exclusive agreements. That's why you don't see anything cool or interesting anymore in major sports video games, as the article mentions

No! Not when adults fight over new boxes arriving at stores and not when a pack of 5 cards goes for $25. It’s an industry that time and again builds up a massive bubble only to see it pop from over supply.

Pretty sure Pokemon cards is all the rage now, same business model. Marketing directly to children and near-infinite production margins.

Yup. Kids play it fairly regularly, and my 7 year old has some, despite not actually knowing how to pla.

My friends did in the 2000s, mostly as impulse buys in the checkout line when mom was paying for groceries. I still get a pack now and then because it’s fun just to see who you get.

I’m sure they’re not as popular as when they came with gum (and less popular as when they came with tobacco).

Yes, why not make this an App, that can show cards but also short video fragments.

While we are at it, we should also add some technology that makes them non-fungible, how about a blockchain?

Maybe without the tangible aspect even children would realise they are paying $$$ for infinitely reproducible pixels.

IE the death of economics as i understand it.

I recall playing with knockoff Pokémon trading cards when I was a kid. Same fun, $/$$ instead of $$$.

Highly doubt. Somehow video games are funding themselves selling skins. My understanding is that Gen Z eats them up. I’m a late millenial, and the Skyrim horse armor debacle was a formative experience, as such I have never paid for a skin, and neither have any of my (similarly aged) friends. Z

Horse armor was Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, I pirated it :) I did, however, pay for the Shivering Isles expansion.

That's Hearthstone

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