One thing Pokemon does pretty well though is keeping the collector side and the player side largely separate. If you just want to buy singles of the cards you need to play, that's cheap. You can get a top tier competitive deck for like $50-100 last time I checked, which is dirt cheap in the TCG space.

The high value Pokemon chase cards are like alt arts and stuff, the normal versions of good cards are usually plentiful. Unlike a game like Magic where all the highest power cards are also the most expensive.

Boil all Finance Bros

You could show your niece how cool proxying is

Cecilily is has some cool vids on her channel, she does a good job at presenting some Pokemon-hobby related issue as a way to bait and hook in casual viewers and before you know it, boom critiques of capitalism, I would recommend her to slightly woke normies who like Pokemon ig

Yeah it sucks because the actual card game was pretty fun for a while.

People forget that Pokemon started out as a bunch of dorks making an homage to bug catching. Pokemon's own success kind of fucked it over.

I'd say the bigger something gets, the more likely it is the investor ghouls come out and strip it for parts.

‘friend of the channel Carl has been predicting this for a while’

reminds me of a video from a few months ago where this guy was explaining how hard getting cards is nowadays, lineups of mostly scalpers an hour before the store opens

Ohhh, now I get why all the shops I used to buy TTRPG books at are just Pokemon and MTG now, and all the TTRPG books I find (not counting D&D and Pathfinder etc) are expansions with no core books

Started with MagicTCG. Hasbro just has them spitting out tons of slop, it's sad.

I think it's a good idea to generally steer clear of anything that's basically gambling, particularly gambling targeted at kids. Collectible-focused card games, gacha games, games focused on loot boxes.

I've been playing Riftbound, the game itself is great but overall it's completely ruined by the scalpers and investment bros.

And proxying is hardly an option because you can only really play with mutliple people on tournaments and proxies aren't allowed, also people tend to get defensive about this I think, because they have spent money on the game and want it to still be meaningful.