Just a hypothetical that popped into my head. Between the recent trade of the charizards for the Illustrator card and the endless debates on card pricing…
Hypothetical: Only new (sealed) product can be purchased with cash. Once you open the packs and are left with the singles, your only means of getting rid of the individual cards is to give them away or trade them for another card(s).
Essentially, living in a world where the act of trading money for card singles is illegal, and you are “buying in” to the whole Trading Card Game idea (like so many of us did in grade school). The only means of obtaining new cards for your collection is…
to pull them yourself
have them given to you (no strings attached)
you trade them for other cards (the amount of cards doesn’t matter - it doesn’t have to be a 1:1 trade)
And no, you can’t “give” someone a card for free and then someone “gives” you another item of similar value (example: I will “give” you this Illustrator and you will “give” me a Bugatti). Also, don’t be lame and say something stupid like “well if this was the landscape of the World, and money for things doesn’t matter then BLAH BLAH BLAH.” This thread is what you call a “fun hypothetical”.
Do you think a system like this would sustain itself and would Pokemon still be around today? Assume the tv show, promotional content for Pokemon, movies, and the card release of Base Set, Jungle and Fossil released just as they did but anything after that would be determinant of the success or failure based on this “trade only” system.
Do you think there would be enough demand that people would be perfectly fine with spending money, knowing they will never get money back out of the hobby (back then or today)?
This is essentially how the online tcg works. Packs become currency and the value of a card is quantized to whatever the generally accepted currency is.
Yes, and there are many other examples with intangible items (especially in online games) where this is the same. Probably one of the best examples that comes to mind is Diablo 2. Like a lot of rpg games, there was gold in the game but it was pretty much useless. The preferred currency instead was made up of special items that dropped randomly called runes. The higher level runes (high runes) quickly became the currency of that game. You want this nifty sword? That will be 10 HR please. Granted, these are items obtained from TIME and not MONEY. But you know what they say about that…
A good point to bring up because people buy things (think micro transactions) that in no way will give you real life returns on your investment. Just for the “experience” or satisfaction. And although I think it is hard to replicate that in real life since we have been conditioned to equate value with a monetary value, I would think that (assuming the rules were in place) that it would only be even more popular with a real life tangible product such as Pokémon cards compared to the similar online counterparts.