Will Pokemon outgrow Magic ?

[1steditionbs]

Only time will tell. IMO, I think Pokemon will outgrow MTG. The sheer popularity of the franchise blows MTG out of the water.

[pikachuisbestpokemon]

@dblast

@pikachuisbestpokemon , so you are saying magic is not declining because it has a good base?

@dblast , Yes absolutely. At a fundamental level over the next 20 years, MTG is still strong but longer than that and I see cracks starting to form. The problem is if you don’t have a younger generation pumping money into the hobby then overtime the community just turns into people predominately selling their collections off. Same thing happened to stamp collections. People died, rare stamps hit the market, demand was weak so prices declined. More selling than buying.

That’s why I put so much focus on trying to understand what young people are doing because the young people are the future of everything.

The decline of every hobby always begins with the young people not being interested. Pez dispensers and mechanical banks were also red hot markets but the reality is that young people weren’t interested in it so the price of those items plummeted.

When I look at pokemon TCG, what I see is a hobby that is growing. Social media apps like instaflex are a major driver of growth as well as platforms like youtube. The popularity of youtubers like leonhart, unlistedleaf with kid focused content is a significant sign of future growth.

[yz2428]

@kaldoverde

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.

I would have to agree very much with this take. I am no expert on either Pokemon or MTG. To measure success, it depends on what your criteria and metrics are. I think when Pokemon will have “surpassed” MTG will be when that PSA 10 1st edition Charizard finally surpasses a BGS quad 9.5 Alpha Lotus in a sale/auction. That’s more of a perception metric, but it’s one that holds a lot of weight for most people I think. If that is true, I would imagine our zard will have to hit something like 200-500k.

[ccrntrade]

Wait Pokemon hasn’t already outgrown Magic?

[dblast]

Okay, another thought was that card shop or card collectors may hold graded cards as investments.

MTG has a lot of graded cards investors, and some of the magic cards have reached very high prices.

Pokemon has recently gained a lot more traction in the graded cards department. I would even assume that hobby shops are storing more Pokemon Cards (graded and raw) as investments, compared to magic cards. Again, I don’t know much about Magic cards, but have seen more members in the forum hobby switch from MTG.

I think Pokemon may have outgrown magic overall, but considering the values of graded cards and collectible graded cards market share, maybe less, overall…

@hyruleguardian , to better focus the conversation: Do you see Pokemon graded cards, overall, as having more value storage then Magic Cards? There are illustrators and Black Lotus that are pushing crazy prices, but I’d like to see the 1st Ed. Charizard or something within the english markets reach levels of Magic Cards.

It may be due to my lack of understanding for magic cards market, ie. there are other reasons why black lotus and print runs cause the high dollar value, psacard shows having less then a dozen psa 10s for the black lotuses, but Google shows there’s 1,100 alpha black lotus

There are only 120 PSA 10 graded PSA charizard 1st edition. I’m not sure how many 1st edition Charizards were printed, but there are 2,387 in the PSAcard pops. Either way, the wotc 1st ed. shows very limited card production as well. And given the overall interest in Pokemon as a whole, I think it’s a good amount and comparable.

@pikachuisbestpokemon, lmao, instaflex.