I don’t know much about the magic community, but seems like many are converting to Pokemon card collecting… I am under the assumption that magic cards has a significant market share of collectibles. Do you see Pokemon outgrowing Magic, or things will return to normal after corona?
Anyone care to comment on the topic? It’s purely speculative of course. Seems like the Pokemarket buyers have doubled to say the least.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Have a nice day.
I think so simply because young people don’t really get interested in MTG anymore. Pokemon TCG has the tv show, movies, and games that kids get introduced to. My GF is a kindergarten teacher and she tells me that kids bring their pokemon cards all the time to school so it seems the future of pokemon TCG as a hobby is still strong. I tell her she needs to learn the game and teach other kids how to play 
Magic is no where near to declining though because I would suspect that most collectors in the hobby at 35-45 years old…mid career. So that group still has a solid 20-30 years of career life left. People typically increase their income as they get older. Long-term I see it eventually going the way of stamp collecting.
Seems like your typical magic player would first get introduced to the hobby in middle school or high school. Those kids aren’t playing magic. They’re playing PC games and similar console games instead.
You can not quantify the MTG market. It consists of so many different sub markets (graded collectors, art collectors ,ap collectors, set collectors, players,…) that it is literally impossible to put a value on it. Therefore any further discussion would be completely pointless as it´s pure speculation.
@shadowless, the magic collecting is strong with some. I don’t understand those different submarkets. are they doing well?
Will the sun rise in the morning?
You can not say if a whole aspect is doing well as these sub markets have submarkets of their own. If you are into graded cards there is plenty of people who only collect 9.5(quad), there is some who build an entire set with (9+) and so on. The hightest tier is certainly not doing bad, can´t really speak for the others as I´m not too involved with them. Some cards needed for play recently spiked pretty hard, take that for what it´s worth.
Interesting. That’s fantastic to hear about the magic community is doing well.
As an industry, Pokemon already outgrew Magic the gathering by a huge margin. It is the biggest franchise after all, games merchandise, TCG, licensing deals, anime, movies, amusement park, etc etc. Trade Card Game however, maybe not.
I think you just need to elaborate more on your question. Do you mean will player base outgrow Magic? I think the answer is a no. Magic is a very mature and optimized game with so many variations of decks that can be built with the vast amount of cards in the library. Pokemon is still geared towards ages 6+. It’s a much simpler game with simpler mechanics. I think as a player, even myself went from Pokemon to Magic when i was younger.
Or is your question will the values of Pokemon cards outgrow Magic? Who knows? I honestly do not like speculating. I don’t collect them with the hopes the values go up like it’s going up now. It’s just not sustainable. I don’t look at eBay everyday looking at sold prices. It’s like you bought one stock and you keep looking at the ticker going up and down constantly. I collect because I want to collect, as a nostalgia and honestly, because I can. Having a son helps as an excuse. ^_^;
Magic is ultimately a trading card game only but Wizards does a very good job of controlling their print runs based on demand unlike Pokemon. Nintendo will just print print print to pad their profits. I’m sure everyone expected another print run of hidden fates. Until Pokemon has something like Magic does which are the cards on the Reserve List, I don’t think I can trust them when it comes to print runs. Maybe Pokemon vintage cards may catch up to Magic at some point but only time will tell.
I’m ranting again. But i’ll finish with this. IMO there are just way too many people talking about, or youtubers making videos about INVESTING in Pokemon and social media with all the PSA cards just fueling this rise in prices and in turn those people talking about what they’ve invested in, completing the cycle. People be talking about values in a pack or a box or a tin whatnot on youtube.
First off, you can’t talk about value by opening a few packs on a video in the grand scheme of things. Give me a break, you opened a tin. You may luck out and make your money back or you got a bad tin.
You can’t gouge a card’s price’s future trajectory by looking at a few months of data when the card has been in existence for years.
Why not genuinely crack a few packs open without ulterior motives, not yell out OMG for every freaking rare(pet peeve, you know who i’m sure) or show off a set and talk about what you like about it(I’m a fan when smpratte does this actually)
Second, buying to invest is not healthy for a hobby i think. That’s not general interest, that’s not organic growth. These people will sell their cards they bought when it hits a certain target like a stock buy. Hopefully those people aren’t whining and complaining when people start dumping cards and the prices go down. Organic growth and interest will decide at the end if Pokemon will outgrow Magic, value wise and trading game wise. For example, when the expansion to S&S comes out next month, i expect ORGANIC growth and interest towards the original gen 1 pokemon again bringing back many players. Only time will tell but we’ll see. Thank you for reading through my rant.
@richi2rich , Thanks for the lengthy type up. Lets see… To be more specific, I’m referring to captivating tcg collectible members… magic the gathering’s base is mature, most expensive cards from limited print runs, etc. But, it just seems like the mature market has plateau’d in a sense. Yes its corona times, but there seems to be less spending on Magic Cards. You could say it’s because the hobby stores are closed, or the lack there of events that make magic tcg so enjoyable. But nonetheless, aren’t the top cards seeing either a downward trend, or stabilized with less buyers?
Someone recently mention they’ve taken a break from purchasing Magic cards and buying more Pokemon cards. While magic cards were investments for shops, they may be taking more interest in Pokemon cards. To the extent that they are purchasing large orders on Ebay. The “Hobby switchers”. Almost safe to say some might be selling their Magic Cards to invest into pokemon cards.
I’m not comparing pokemon to magic as to which is undergoing more price increases, but it would seem magic has had a negative experience from corona times.
@shadowless , mentioned playable cards spiked. Those are typically out of hype when they are not the best playables? Or are good playables always going to go up. I don’t understand the dynamics of magic cards.
So its happening before us, there are multiple hobby switchers and they have big bucks ready to buy pokemon cards.
Good playable are not always going up (lol) but they might be less affected than other cards when price swings occur. The whole MTG “economy” was in a downterm already way before covid, as MTG has seen massive spikes around 2018. You also have to take into consideration that a majority of mtg collectors are older than the average pokemon collector, that leading to more obligations (family, mortgages etc).
As someone who has been playing/collecting/investing in Magic since 1994, I am pretty sure Pokemon already has outgrown Magic.
Personally, I noticed the shift around 3-4 years ago and it is not necessarily MTG collectors converting, but rather Pokemon collector base being huge in comparison. MTG collectors do have more disposable income on average and that is why price movements seem more dramatic, but it also has less organic growth as a lot of it is driven by speculation and market buyouts.
Obviously, both hobbies are driven by nostalgia, but let’s delve a bit deeper and try to understand where each comes from, to try and make sense of where they are heading.
MTG - Predomminantly male community 30+ years old, financially literate, with high disposable income and nostalgic of playing the game during their teenage years. The parent company (WOTC) ostracizes community members based on political views, neglects LGS’s for the most part, and is driving direct to consumer online sales and shifting to online play.
Pokemon - Huge franchise and a household name across the whole world, pretty much everyone knows what a Pikachu is and the community is incredibly diverse and driven not exclusively by nostalgia of the TCG, but more importantly (in my opinion) nostalgia of the TV series, the Gameboy games, etc. The parent company (TPC) promotes the franchise across a huge spectrum of items and when it comes to the TCG, still relies on LGS’s and retailers for sales, it also promotes diversity and fun without getting political or creating friction with the community.
With the above in mind it is easy to see why Pokemon has a much more significant growth margin than MTG. I mean, a fan of the cartoon can easily start collecting cards of their favourite Pokemon without ever having played the game, or even understanding its rules.
Pokemon appeals to men and women, young and old and anything inbetween. The community is usually more open and welcoming and more sentimental in their attachment to their collection. Oddly enough, where you see this organic growth heavily at work is not in the high priced items, but rather in the low budget singles market. The sheer volume of Pokemon cards that get sold every day between the ($2-$20) mark is insane, and that is not coming from people who need the latest card for their deck, it is coming from people who love their Pikachus, their Eevees, their Charizards, etc.
MTG collectors on the other hand, are much more driven by value, and you rarely find a collector whose collection is all the Nissas or all the Chandras ever printed. The collecting community revolves mostly around the reserve list and there isn’t really anything giving players an emotional attachment to the characters in the game, which means that $2-$20 bracket is mostly filled by players and speculators rather than collectors.
Even though people tend to compare collectible markets based on their big ticket items, that is just a reflection of how much money is involved in the hobby and not necessarily how big that hobby is. To that end, I believe Pokemon is by far the ultimate collectible of our times and luckily it doesn’t look like TPC will run out of ideas to keep it that way anytime soon. 
@kaldoverde, While you highlighted the volume of sales in the lower price bracket category $2-20, I see the upper end of the market growing substantially.
@dblast, I focused on the lower bracket as it represents the organic growth of the hobby and your question was whether Pokemon would outgrow MTG as a collectible, which I think it already has.
But I totally agree with you that the higher bracket will also grow substantially in relation to MTG propelled not necessarily by financial speculation, but by that organic growth from the bottom to the top.
As Scott mentioned in several of his videos, as people get older, their disposable income also increases, so if you apply this logic to Pokemon, the high end bracket still has a lot to grow as collectors move up the income scales.
Probably. I’m not too familiar with the MTG market tbh and never collected MTG, but I do feel like Pokémon is more widespread around the world due to all the additional products and anime/movies that MTG lack. MTG simply is a lot older than Pokémon and therefore bigger (correct me if I’m wrong), but I indeed think that Pokémon will outgrow MTG one day.
But as I said, I barely know anything about the MTG, so can’t really give a objective opinion. Only someone who knows both markets for at least 5+ years can tbh. And even then, no one can predict the future, so who knows what’s going to happen. It also doesn’t really matter. Both markets are pretty big and will continue to grow either way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (PS: We need a shrug Pikachu emoji… )
Greetz,
Quuador
@quuador, Yeah I don’t know much about magic either. If they have a substantial amount of people in the community, surely the collectible market will be around.
Pokemon is Amazon.
MTG is Walmart
First of all, there are many ways to define “outgrow.” In some ways Pokemon has long since “outgrown” Magic, in other ways it won’t.
Are we talking about long-term value growth? That’s a hard question to answer too. Are we talking about your Lotuses/Illustrators or are we talking about 2020 sealed product? You really need to narrow down the question.
What I will say is that I think Pokemon’s popularity across generations gives me a lot of confidence in the long-term value of certain cards.
My girlfriend is a 1st grade teacher and for the last few weeks they’ve had “theme” for each week. A couple of weeks ago it was The Lion King, then it was Star Wars. And next week the theme will be Pokemon (which was requested by the kids).
I take that as a good sign for Pokemon.