Pokémon cards have seen a record 574% increase in trading in one year
Playing cards illustrated by the greatest science fiction and "heroic fantasy" artists of the moment, the blockchain to make them unique digital works, and a series of novels to accompany the story… Welcome to the fairytale universe of Cross the Ages.
Conceived by the young Marseille-based startupper Sami Chlagou, who is already behind a video game distribution and production company, this project aims to turn a generation's passion for trading cards and role-playing games into a business as disruptive and speculative as the cryptocurrency market.
The 30-year-old is no novice. Since the age of nine he's been collecting Magic: The Gathering cards, one of those games — like Pokemon, Dungeons and Dragons, or Warhammer — that brings together millions of fans around the world.
This game, imagined by the mathematician Richard Garfield in 1993, has become a worldwide succes because of the number of its protagonists (more than 20,000!) who cast and counteract many spells in a moving space-time as well as the immense complexity of its rules that evolve over the course of the game.
Researchers from the University of Georgia and University of Pennsylvania recently compared it to Go and Chess, which, unlike Magic, have defined limits such as board size. To do this, the two study authors coded the powers and properties of each card and had a computer analyse a two-person game.
For some of the 20 million fans worldwide, building a winning hand is a never-ending quest.In the case of chess, determining a winning strategy is calculable. "But with Magic it's impossible because of the enormous number of assumptions," mathematician Stella Biderman, who organised the experiment, explained. "This game has the highest known computer complexity quotient."
To play, you need to build up a collection of at least 60 cards, which you can buy in stores where they are sold in packs of 15. In each pack, eleven cards are common, three are less common and one, a rarer version, gives superior powers. For the fans, of which there are more than 20 million worldwide, building a winning hand is a never-ending quest.
"You have to make each card work in symbiosis with the others and give some cards decisive advantages," says one player.
The oldest cards are the most sought after. Wizard of the Coast, the publisher of Magic (acquired by Hasbro in 1997), has reserved 572 of them that will never be reprinted. The only way to get them, therefore, is in the second-hand market, and the prices are skyrocketing.
In late January, a very rare, and mint condition (with a PSA rating of 10) copy of the game's Alpha Series Black Lotus card, of which there are reportedly only seven copies in the world, was auctioned off on eBay for $511,000. "That's how high the rarest of the rare can go," another player enthused.
Three cards in particular are awaiting their listing: Proposal, Splendid Genesis and Fraternal Exaltation, each produced only once to mark three key movements in Richard Garfield's life, namely his proposal and the birth of his two daughters.
The T206 Honus Wagner baseball card, of which fewer than 200 copies were issued in 1909, rocked the market when it sold for a record $3.751 million on May 23. "The same madness is lurking for the Magic cards," says one investor.
It was an American collector, Jonathan Medina, who launched their speculative movement in April 2010, recounting in lengthy posts his search for the "pack to power" to achieve the ideal hand he was striving for. By trading sets of cards around the world 98 times, he writes that he managed to collect several of the out-of-print editions he was striving for, including a Mix Pearl, one of the nine extremely rare cards printed in late 1993.
Magic: The Gathering has more than 20,000 participants — Photo: Wizards_magicizards_magic
Since then, exchanges have become professionalized around marketplace like MTGStocks, Cardmarket or TCGPlayer. No authority regulates the translations, leaving it to the law of supply and demand fuelled by nostalgia.
"Like me, the first players are now in their 40s and earn enough to afford the cards they dreamed of as teenagers," says our investor, who pours a good part of his savings into these risky transactions.
The eBay platform, where much of the trading card business is done, has seen a 142% growth in transactions in 2020 with 4 million more cards sold. Pokémon topped the list with a record 574% increase in trading in one year, followed by basketball and baseball sports cards. Magic: The Gathering is in fourth place.
"New collectors are entering the card space as another investment avenue to diversify their investment portfolio. We expect this trajectory to follow suit in 2021," says Nicole Colombo, general manager of collectibles and trading cards at eBay.
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