Writings from the Furnace

Preamble

Once upon a time, young people divided themselves into “tribes” or “groups” based mostly on aesthetic preferences. There were the jocks, the goths, the nerds, and so on and so forth, as anyone who has watched one of those late-1990s early-2000s dumb movies about high-school can ascertain. I belonged, quite rightfully (and frankly quite happily as well), to the group of “nerds”. By participating in such a culture all those years ago means I had in-depth experience with trading card games, a world both fascinating and utterly depraved, which I’d like to share with the reader, presumably fortunate enough to have avoided these cardboard menaces, for it’s a truly interesting subject, especially in the current year (as of writing this, the very tail end of 2022).

The reader may or may not be aware that from the apocalyptic year of 2020 onwards, the prices of trading cards of all varieties, from baseball to Yu-gi-oh,¹ skyrocketed. The oddest thing about this, though, is that by definition physical card games are played in person, which meant their price rose precisely during the moment no one could actually play with the bloody things, since, by being essentially a kind of board game, means they must be played physically, in person. Pundits like to ascribe this to all sorts of reasons, from the stimulus checks issued during the pandemic—the government mandated money (in the US) used to prop up demand in the midst of a collapsing economy—being lavishly spent on the most expensive bits of cardboard players could not acquire before, to just evil manipulative shadowy investors (typified into the odd figure of Rudy, proud owner of a Youtube channel called “Alpha Investments” whose sole purpose is to give thinly veiled “investment advice” on which bits of cardboard are a good idea to buy and hold to eventually resell at a profit), or some sort of collectible boom, something to do whilst one waited for things to “go back to normal”, so to speak.

I believe that these interpretations have a kernel of truth; demand did in fact rise a bit from players having more disposable income, be it from the suppressed demand (i.e. you can’t spend your money going out to eat or drink, etc.) being shifted to hobby goods; “investment” channels on trading cards grew quite a bit, especially those associated with Pokémon, mostly because the youtuber Logan Paul, who commands an impressive viewerbase numbering in the millions (a great deal of them children) started opening very old and very expensive boxes of Pokémon cards, thus drawing massive attention to the idea that trading cards are valuable collectibles, not unlike comics and such. But these are symptoms of the issue, rather than its causes; the fact is that trading cards, since their very inception, have been steadily going up in price, and recently have skyrocketed (this can be observed in the “retro” video-game market as well). The reality is that all these kinds of goods, by their own very scarce nature (especially very old versions), have been turned into financial instruments, and thus have been subject to the very same hyperinflation that all financial assets have undergone since 2008 (and which are likely to crash spectacularly).

Trading cards, as such, are a kind of object designed to be worth money, so long as there are people interested in playing the game. And this is what I’d like to talk about, if perhaps at a superficial level: trading card games are not, and have never really been, principally about playing a game. Sure, they can be pretty fun (as my many years of Magic the Gathering can attest to) but it’s not about them being fun or not. It has never been about them being fun or not. It’ll never be about them being fun or not. The fun is a side-product of engaging in the true big-boys game: Cardboard Wall Street. But before properly starting this essay I must point out the person that best examined this element of trading cards: Jesse Mason, whose “Magical Capitalism” piece, on the capitalist nature of Magic the Gathering, has been a great inspiration.² I’d really recommend reading his piece if you are interested in this strange subject. It should be noted, though, that given the age of his piece, the “exorbitant” amounts he refers to have become quaint and even perhaps a bit nostalgic.

I.

Legends tell that trading card games were invented in the early 90’s by Richard Garfield, a math major, on his spare time together with his university buddies. The idea was simple, but ingenious: have the game pieces be cards, and thus players could combine them in a nearly infinite amount of ways. I don’t really want to get into the nitty gritty of things, which are far better explained by Jesse Mason; the point is that almost like in a terrible laboratory accident, Garfield and friends invented the ultimate effigy of capitalism. It has often seemed to me that videogames are perhaps the true cultural object of the neoliberal age, its most accurate reflection, a cultural form which is inextricably linked to the idea of brands and technocratic progress; but the real inheritor of Ayn Rand’s dream might just be Magic the Gathering.

What makes trading card games so capitalistic? There are several elements: first and foremost, the cards come in randomized “booster packs”, little plastic shells that hold inside them between 5 and 20 random cards, depending on the game. But, beyond that, cards have “rarities” (common, uncommon, rare, etc.), an arbitrary (or semi-arbitrary) value decided by the designers that produces artificial scarcity of certain cards, and abundance of others. It should come as no surprise that many of the very best cards are also the very rarest.³

This is transparently a form of gambling. Under this distribution model, there is no way to acquire the cards that you want except by trading with another person who was actually lucky enough to pull the card you want. Under the best of circumstances, you can trade some of the cards you have but don’t want for cards the other person has but doesn’t want; in such occasions, both parties tend to be happy about the transaction. Thing is, this is not always possible; as such, in the cases where you have no cards the other person desires, then the transaction must be facilitated by means of the “universal solvent”, namely money. As such, at the very moment card games were born,⁴ a market for trading cards was also born, like a cursed conjoined twin, its seedy cardboard underbelly. In the olden days of the 90’s, this was done by means of monthly catalogs and magazines, which documented the price of specific cards (and it should be noted that from the beginning there were cards worth hundreds of dollars), but nowadays there are veritable stock exchanges for cards, as in the giant TCGMarket, which allows anyone to put up their own cards for sale, which greatly facilitates the finding of a buyer, and which track the price variation of each card in quite comprehensive graphs.

In a sense the market for cards was just not the result of some crafty folks smelling profit in the air like vultures taken to carrion, but a necessary response to the cursed institution of the booster pack. No player except the very richest would be able to afford to acquire the cards they want by continually opening booster packs; there is something rather cruel in forcing the distribution of game pieces through the mechanism of luck: much like capitalism, if you don’t get the cards you want, the only response is “tough luck, should have been born richer or luckier.”⁵ Wizards of the Coast (the company that makes Magic), Konami (which makes Yu-gi-oh), The Pokémon Company and the like have made princely sums of money in the last few decades: the multibillion dollar toy conglomerate Hasbro’s most profitable division is by far Wizards of the Coast, and their most profitable product is, without a doubt, Magic. This is also reinforced by the fact that card games have been in a continous boom since their inception; the amount of corporations which have tried and most likely failed to create a successful card game is indictment of their relatively small production costs and potentially outrageous profits (to name a few, some successful and some not: Star Wars, Dragon Ball, Fire Emblem, Digimon, Lord of the Rings…)

Still, this is not enough to say that trading card games are the most capitalistic games; we must also look at the cards themselves. The main reason why they’re so spectacularly profitable is because they’re so damn cheap to make; after all, they’re just bits of colored paper. Most of the expenses that bear no immediate return are labor expenses (i.e. surplus value extraction, as is to be expected): paying designers to make cool cards that will be desirable without completely breaking the game, artists to paint pretty images to illustrate the cards, writers to come up with the lore of the game, etc. The companies have special agreements with the major card manufacturers around the world, and in bulk each card costs no more than pennies to produce overall; the cheapest bundle of fifteen of them is commonly sold for around four dollars. It doesn’t take a PHd in economics to understand why they are so damn profitable.

In a sense the actual difficulty in manufacturing cards lies in making them feel as if they should be worth a lot of money; to make them feel special, rare, pretty, etc., that you wouldn’t feel bad paying tens or hundreds of bucks on colored paper. As such, applying a coat of reflective material on particularly powerful cards makes them even more desirable—a process called “foiling”, which, though often aesthetically ugly, almost always makes cards rarer and more expensive. I am always aghast at the amounts of cash that people, reasonable and money-wise folks, spend to make their cards look prettier. Though I am not one to judge how people spend their money, the sums spent are often breathtaking, and effectively pointless, since shinier cards are just as playable as the boring old matte ones.

More powerful or “prettier” cards command heftier sums in the “secondary market”, be it because of too much demand or too little supply. This name is no accident: the market is “secondary” not just because it feeds on the “primary” market of selling packs, but because all the companies that produce these cards must produce them under the pretense that all they are making are game pieces, all with the same value, all distinguished only by the text and image printed on it. It’s bollocks, of course, but for these companies to admit that certain cards are more valuable and more expensive than others would immediately transform a booster pack into what it actually is, namely a sort of convoluted lottery ticket, whose payout is money-equivalent cardboard, which would obviously be gambling and thus subject to heavy restrictions in a bunch of countries, including the US. (And morally reprehensible as well…)

This is indeed a fascinating point about trading cards: they are probably one of the most relevant completely unregulated markets in existence.⁷ In the card market anything goes: cornering the market to drive scarcity, “pumping and dumping” (buying immense amounts of cards to raise their price then quickly selling them back, crashing the price); insider trading from people connected to the companies that know which cards will suddenly become more powerful or more relevant in the future, thus driving up their prices, or which will be reprinted, lowering their prices; monopolies and oligopolies, with a few major companies being able to corner the market for particular cards, and all sorts of shady business deals that would make Wall Street veterans blush. Trading cards are not just like capitalism; they are capitalism, and in a sense the freest market of them all.

People who actually play these games may object to the things I’m saying, and in a sense they would be right; when you are playing any of these games, be it Pokémon or Magic, you are focused in the internal mechanisms of the game, the resources, how to beat your opponents, etc. But make no mistake—and I am quite convinced of this—deep down, perhaps even unconsciously at times, every card game player knows they are playing with money first and game pieces second, which is why it often feels so bad to play against someone with a deck far more expensive that your own: they have access to powerful cards which feel entirely unfair for someone that does not have hundreds of dollars to spend in cardboard. (Or, what happens more often, people are just gatekept from playing the game.)

Is this a bad thing? Yes and no. There is no denying that the Roaring 20’s style high roller casino that is card games brought a lot of attention to them, and thus a diverse and engaged playerbase, many of them trying to make decks that are cheap but still able to go toe to toe against the most powerful contenders. The solution to the capitalistic nature of card games, “Living Card Games”, that is, games in which you buy a complete set of all the cards at once, more or less like a board game like Settlers of Catan, don’t seem to be terribly popular or successful. This is probably explained because it is undeniable that people are enticed by the (usually false) proposition that they can make money playing the game. As Jesse Mason puts it,

Even playing Limited, the format where no one needs anything other than to sign up for an event, people are more likely to be praying to open a foil of the set’s chase mythic. And why wouldn’t they? For most drafts, the highest reward for winning matches is enough store credit to be able to enter the next draft, whereas a card can easily be worth over $100 straight from a Standard-legal set. It’s teaching players that what matters isn’t the game, but the possessions they use to play the game.

Since the real rewards are in the hands of other players (what they opened from packs in that draft), players are all trying to play one another. They’re not trying to pull one over on Wizards, of course; that’s impossible, because Wizards is a level separated from the sales of cards, disingenuously refusing to acknowledge that these sales even exist. Just to have the cards to play the game, people want to scam one another out of small amounts of value.

Which is, to some degree, rational. There are two games going on here: the game of playing Magic, and the game of making money (or money-equivalent-cards) from other Magic players. Which would you rather be good at?

The best player in the room earns almost nothing, even from winning a relatively large tournament. The best players in the world can often barely squeak out a living from Magic, and a good portion of that is from third parties paying them to write or promote them. (And those third parties get their money from… selling Magic cards.)

The best people in Magic finance, though, get a significantly larger reward. The amount of money you can make with, for example, a successful speculation, or a buyout, or selling cards to a store with a mistakenly-high buylist price, is almost unbounded.

So of course, people want to become the Magic finance kings. They memorize the equivalent of enormous, multi-variable Excel spreadsheets, with numbers constantly changing from week to week. They invest their own money into product with the hope of making a return on it. In other words, they’re capitalists.

(My emphasis). The reality of card games means the rich get richer and the poor survive on the scraps they can afford; it is perhaps the most stratified gaming experience one can have, where your class more or less determines which decks or kinds of gameplay you can experience. If you are poor, tough luck, better like playing this one kinda cheap deck or losing. Of course, as in every place the market invades, people tend to resist and produce alternatives: there are ways of playing that limit the price of the cards that can be used to say, 79 cents per card and the like; but the reality of the cards as money tokens becomes even more pronounced that way. Sometimes there are officially sanctioned formats which happen to be cheaper, such as Magic’s Pauper (the name says enough by itself…) which only allows cards of the common rarity to be played, which are by definition cheaper.

II.

I’ve spend a good bunch of words explaining how cards have become a sort of money-token, in a sense; but people do play them, and they play them often in card stores. Comic stores and the like are a fixture of “nerd culture”, so to speak, and card stores are a particularly curious subset of these businesses: they thrive on the reselling of individual cards at a markup, and their fortunes are bound to the corporations that make these cards like Faust was bound to Mephisto. If a particular set of cards is beloved, they thrive; if a set of cards is seen as uninteresting, they go bankrupt by the dozens. Their luck is that since card games are gambling in all but name, they likewise do tend to attract the weakest and most exploitable sorts of folks who end up hopelessly addicted, which guarantees that no matter how bad and how expensive cards get, there always will be those that will buy them. (A joking name for Magic cards is “cardboard crack”. I don’t think I need to explain it.)

There’s something obscene in the business of dealing cards. It’s a sort of business that thrives on fools and desperate people, and this sort of money always begets the worst in folks. Still, having a card shop of their own is the petty bourgeois dream of many players, a fact that reflects the class from which most players hail from. To have all those cards at their disposal, even the most expensive ones! Just imagine! It’s a fool’s errand, though, and the margins for those middlemen are quite slim, especially when compared with the big fish in this pond. 2020 broke many stores, and they won’t be replaced.

If cards were merely a pastime, like playing a game of Catan, they would be valuable, but not nearly as valuable as they actually are. One of the smartest things companies learned to do right from the beginning was to market these games to be as skill intensive as a game of chess (which sometimes they are, but frankly not all that often; there is too much luck involved with the shuffling of a deck of cards; it’s at best closer to a sort of very skewed poker) and host tournaments with prizes in them. If you’re good enough, you could theoretically make a living from playing Magic! (It should be noted that Wizards, in its typical corporate minmaxxing, recently essentially killed Magic’s tournament scene.) This is nonsense, but it is a dream which has been sold since the 90’s, and the most expensive cards tend to be the most competitively viable ones, sorta like tickets to the grand prize of the tournaments, which mostly consist of a relevant but negligible amount of money for the effort and above all social clout.

As with capitalism, these games are fiendishly competitive, which often brings out the worst in people, namely cheating, defrauding, poisoning relations, etc. Class is the lifeblood of card games, and every player is reminded quite viciously of their place in the world when they had to opt for a cheaper and subpar card choice and face someone who had no problems acquiring the flashiest cards. “You are poor”, these cardboard rectangles seem to scream, “and you should be ashamed of being poor.” ⁸ To play a card game is to relate to others’ class; whilst yes, class is present even in innocuous or bad board games, in theory when playing a game of Monopoly or the like all players are in a position of equal standing, and whether one is a billionaire or rather poor, in the game their starting position is the same, and as such they have, in theory, an equal chance of winning. This is not the case with trading cards, since the types of cards you can afford determine from the get go the odds of your victory. The only saving grace, though, is that given the extremely luck-intensive nature of the games, it means that even very expensive decks can “brick”, that is, the player can draw an unplayable hand and lose because of that; I myself find this to be a distasteful aspect of them, since it more or less means that yeah, you can win the game, insofar as your opponent is rendered incapable of playing because of something entirely outside their control, independent of my or their own skill in the game. In extreme scenarios the games become little more than elaborate coin flips, something very boring to play or watch.

Given that particular combinations of cards are more powerful than others, these sorts of games suffer from a particularly acute problem in their design: certain decks are better than others. In a vacuum this is not necessarily a bad thing, but given that the companies release new cards every year, they are left with two solutions, neither particularly good: first, they can print cards more or less of the same power level, and ban from play egregiously powerful cards that everyone would be forced to play otherwise. This is not a great solution, given that players may have spent a good amount of money getting powerful cards which they can no longer use, which rightfully makes them very angry. Secondly, the company may print more powerful cards than before, which leaves the players in an eternal rat race to buy the newest and most effective cards, a solution obviously beloved by companies’ bottom line, but that has the nasty side effect of making the game extremely unbalanced, even broken at times, and in a sense “soft-banning” the players’ older cards, since they’ll be so underpowered that they become effectively useless. In my experience companies generally opt for a mixture of both solutions, and the smarter ones create several “formats”, that is, modes of playing with the cards that only accept recently printed cards, or cards of a particular rarity, or only a single of each card, etc. (like the aforementioned Pauper), which tends to mitigate power inbalances, but never quite resolving them. Most card games tend to implode under these contradictory pressures, and the few that survive mostly do so on the back of nostalgia or very strong branding, which guarantees player retention even through the roughest years.

Alongside the card companies, the card stores and the players, there are tons of companies dedicated to selling all manner of junk related to card games. Since cards have value, and they exist by the billions, the main difference between two copies of the same card is their physical state, that is, how damaged they are from years of playing. This has spawned a truly bizarre world of “cardboard protection goods”, veritable condoms for your cards so that they won’t touch grubby fingers or nasty tables, and keep their value pristine. The lengths many players go in order to keep their cards “safe” is astounding, and veritable rivers of money are spent in card sleeves, sometimes sleeves to be used inside other sleeves, boxes to keep sleeved cards in, rubber mats to play on top of, etc. There is a very impressive and sizable industry focused on producing plastic “protection” for cards, lest their value is lessened by a particular dent or scratch.⁹

It is evident that if cards were abundant and cheap, almost no one would care much for having them triple-sleeved or the like; but since cards are money tokens, keeping their value intact is more important than anything else. You’d like to eventually resell your expensive cards for a profit later on, won’t you? And this brings me to the proverbial “Sword of Damocles” that has hanged above card games since their inception: are these cards in a financial bubble? Probably; it’s hard to say for sure. If it is a bubble, it has yet to pop in the last thirty years, so some skepticism is warranted; the absolutely outrageous price old cards fetch, especially in Magic, a game that has a weird promise never to reprint certain very old cards,¹⁰ has doomed a good chunk of the game to be able to be fully enjoyed only the very richest. So long as these never get reprinted, they’ll go higher and higher, and whilst there are greater fools to buy them (and there are plenty) they’ll stay up; if, for some reason, card games become unpopular, these will become nothing more than what they actually are, namely colored cardboard. Given that people do not believe these games will ever become unpopular, there is an argument to say it technically is not a bubble. Overall, I feel that the main question is not whether they are a bubble or not, but when will obscene prices for cheap cardboard finally be too much for the players, forcing the companies to either devalue their product by flooding the market, or to accept an ever-dwindling playerbase. (Some companies, such as Pokémon and Konami, have opted quite clearly for the former; Magic is in a sense the outlier, and it remains to be seen for how long it’ll be able to maintain its current “razor’s edge” reprinting policy).

It should be noted that the relation of the companies with the wider “ecossystem” around the game is uncertain at best and hostile at worst. Corporations that make trading cards must exist under the judicial assumption that there is no secondary market, nothing besides the straightforward selling of booster packs. This, of course, denies said corporations access to the obscenely lucrative secondary market, which, if they could access, they would profit in a kind of “double-whammy”: to have their cake and eat it too. This means corporations are always looking for ways to eat into the profits of resellers, without actually making them go bust, which would have disastrous consequences for their games (players would have nowhere officially sanctioned to play at, essentially). This is a phenomenon that has reached stratospheric heights during the last two years, something I originally could not have envisioned. The poster boy for “greed” (in fact, just run of the mill profit maximization, which gamers often only see through moral terms, instead of the obviously structural incentives that drive this more or less unavoidably) is Wizards of the Coast, with their egregious new strategies: sellying absurdly overpriced booster with special alternative art versions of cards (“collector booster”), which range from 20 to 30 dollars usually, but that can reach as high as 100 dollars, or even the unbelieable sum of 250 dollars per booster, as in the ill-fated Magic 30th.¹¹

Their goal is, of course, to eat more and more of the secondary market pie, by tacking onto the booster packs the extra price the more valuable cards would be expected to have anyway. This has caused the (admiteddly kinda funny) secondary effect of making regular cards worth absolutely nothing, which has wreacked havoc on the secondary market (though which has made the game more accessible, it should be noted, at the very least in its newer packs). Besides that, Wizards has started the dangerous practice of selling cards direct-to-consumer on their website, to be delivered by mail, through what they call “Secret Lairs”, which are nothing more than the world of limited-edition sneakers being imported into Magic, and which amounts to effectively admitting that cards have secondary market value (why were 5 fetchlands sold for $200 and 5 basic lands sold for $30? Aren’t all cards worth technically the same value? The excuse that fetchlands had fancier packaging is just ridiculous to the point of bad faith). The long-term consequences of this are still to be seen, but the extreme profit maximization has drawn the concern of Hasbro investors, to the point of reaching mainstream news, something unusual for card games.¹²

It should be noted that companies can atually choose to destroy the secondary market value of their product; it is well known that Konami, after a certain amount of months (6-12, usually), reprints expensive cards to the ground, often cutting their value by half or even more. This is of course just another example of the contentious relation between a corporation and secondary-market stores: Konami is content to make cards be ridiculously rare and expensive (their rarity system is the worst of all card games by far), in order to drive sales of booster boxes, until newer boxes come out, by the time of which it’s fair game to destroy resellers’ inventory value by either banning expensive cards (so that people are forced to buy the new expensive ones) or just by massively reprinting. This results in a spectacularly volatile market, which is frankly eventually to the benefit of the playerbase, but which also causes much grief to said players (if they want to compete in tournaments they must buy expensive cards, in the sure knowledge that very soon a card they pay $100 for will cost $50, a deflation which usually would be catastrophic if not for the fact that players need to have the cards in order to compete with them, thus forcing them to buy at price-gouging rates).

III.

These concerns clearly are aimed at the printed cards, that is, paper product. A recent innovation, especially since the release of Blizzard’s Hearthstone, has been digital card games. They are, in general, simply digital versions of paper card games. Given the variable nature of these games, they tend to have extremely complicated rulebooks, hundreds of pages long, explaining in minute detail how every single part of the game interacts with one another. This is nightmarish for a new player, but rather convenient for programmers trying to transform it into a digital game.

Playing with paper cards and keeping track of the rules oneself inevitably causes many misplays, from bad moves to accidental rule infractions (sometimes egregious ones). I cannot stress this enough: these games are extremely complicated.¹³ Tournaments even have rule “judges”, that is, people insane enough to have carefully studied the rules manuals and that have the job of explaining or guaranteeing that the game will be properly played (as well as to prevent cheating). Having the computer keep track of rules definitely helps new players navigate and learn the game in a less pressuring environment, and gives the games a semblance of cohesion that playing them with paper often lacks.

Broadly speaking, there are two branches of digital card games: those that are digital-only (have started as computer games) and ports of paper card games. Digital-only card games (such as the aforementioned Hearthstone) can do some cute things which would be difficult with paper cards, such as having cards randomly decide their effects, or having a player drawing cards from the opponent’s deck and the like. The main difference, though, lies on the fact that digital-only games can “nerf” cards, that is, balance cards after they have been released, which tends to make them less prone to breakage. For obvious reasons paper games cannot do the same, since you can hardly errata a printed card without causing immense confusion (the card then has an effect different from what is written on it, and the correct effect is only known if the player happens to have a newer copy of the card or they check an official source to see exactly what the card does, a cumbersome process. It should be noted that this never stopped Konami from issuing dozens of game-changing erratas which make knowing what a card did in a particular point in time a “fun” exercise—I’m looking at you, Necrovalley).

The most curious thing about digital card games is the fact that they often are too accurate a facsimile of the real thing. By that I mean they often insist on the booster pack model, despite having no apparent reason to do so. In a paper card game, one could excuse the companies for saying that booster packs are merely the easiest way to deliver cards of all sorts to players at a cheap price point (this is debatable, but hardly indefensible at all); digital cards, by definition, do not exist except as combinations of electronic data. There is no particular reason for cards to be unable to be directly purchased by the player, at their own leisure and interest (a good example of this is Riot Games’s quite impressive Legends of Runeterra, a rather well made game). Still, they insist in having the booster pack model, and in a even worse way than in paper.

As I mentioned above, given booster packs’ stupid distribution method, people tend to trade/buy cards from one another. In most digital card games this is often not possible (there literally isn’t an option to trade cards coded in the game), and their way to address this is by allocating a certain number of “wildcards”, that is, cards which can be redeemed for any card the player desires, or points, which amount to the same result. In the case of wildcards being easy to purchase and cheap or generously given (as in the aforementioned Runeterra) this can be a pleasant acquisition experience; in cases such as Magic Arena, where the only way to reliably acquire wildcards is by opening digital booster packs, it can be a tiring and expensive endeavor (though it seems that Wizards started selling wildcards, obviously at price-gouging rates…) People that are forced to have a complete card collection, such as youtubers and streamers that have to play with all sorts of decks, report that the overall cost of getting all the cards you want is exorbitant, many times more that to get the same cards in paper.

This at first glance seems nonsensical: why would it be more expensive to own digital cards than to own paper cards, which you can hold and set fire to and do whatever your heart desires? Precisely because companies have figured out that they have no incentive to make it easy for players to get the cards they want. The gambling nature of booster packs (or, in the digital realm, card loot boxes) means that many players will spend copious amounts of cash trying to get the cards they want, at almost no cost for the company, except server maintenance and software development costs (and these are often skimped on, and frequently clients behave erratically or are just shoddily coded, as in Magic Arena…) Digital card games, even more than physical ones, are unbelievable sources of profit, since digital cards don’t even have to be printed; the only active cost is the very negligible server costs to “store” player’s cards, which amounts to little more than a number on a database (does player x have card y? How many copies?)

All of the big card games have digital clients, with varying levels of “greed”; it’s not desireable to limit card obtention too much, since that’ll just drive players away, and you can’t rely only on “whales” (players that spend tremendous amounts of money on the game), since for the game to be attractive you need enough players to populate games so that the game doesn’t feel completely barren and devoid of activity. There is a balancing act to be made, though, and one that succesful managing can reap obscene rewards (Duel Links is Konami’s most profitable venture). Digital card games are the “future”, so to speak; but a future which is nothing but a worse version of the past in a sense, since they refuse (barring few exceptions) to ditch the bad (but tremendously profitable) parts of card games, which are rendered unnecessary in the digital format, and they instead double down on the randomness of opening packing without even the market as a flawed mitigating factor in card obtention.

IV.

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

—Marx, Capital Volume 1, Chapter 1¹⁴

Marx, in Capital’s first chapter, notably makes a distinction in two kinds of value that objects possess. The first of those is “use-value”, that is, the utility an object serves. A shirt serves to be worn; a knife to cut; food to eat, etc. All objects are meaningful to humans only insofar as they serve some purpose, be it either straightforwardly utilitarian, or more profound or abstract (i.e. art, entertainment, etc.) Humans have always created use values, since we need to make stuff that helps us live. There is nothing particularly mysterious about it.

The second of these values is “exchange-value”, which can be simply stated to be the price of the object, it’s cost in money. All objects have use-values or are useless; only commodities have exchange-values. If I make a comb to use on my own hair, it is an object with use-value; if I have no intention to sell it, it effectively has no exchange-value (though I could make it into a commodity by taking it to the market with the intention to sell it). Use-values can’t really be compared: is a comb more valueable than a knife? It depends on what you want to do, of course, but the premise is pretty much absurd from the get-go. Exchange-values, on the other hand, are just numbers; they are either higher or lower than one another. The knife is more expensive than the comb; therefore it’s more valueable.

Card games have a very strange relation to these properties; they in fact have two use-values, one “real” one and a sort of “metaphysical” one. The “real” use-value is the card seen as an abstraction: a piece to play a game. In this sense we look at cards like Wizards looks at cards: they are colored pieces of cardboard, all costing roughly the same amount of labor and money to make, and which are functionally indistinguishable from one another except in the context of the game. The “metaphysical” use-value is precisely that: the value that a card has solely during a game. A card is “better” (that is, more useful) than another only within the context of the game, when cards can be stronger or weaker than others. It is obvious that both values really exist, but the second one is moved by abstractions which are constantly shifting in the very act of printing new cards, and which even under different formats vary wildly.¹⁵ The thing is that the metaphysical use-value has essentially no relation to the labor that went into the making of the card (not even the design labor, since often cards which are too powerful were overlooked by the designers, and thus given less labor, not more, in their making).

This means cards have a sort of double effect on the player’s psyche: as a durable good (which can be aestethically contemplated, for example, and whose price can be drived solely by scarcity—see the terrible cards from Alpha that are worth hundreds of dollars simply because they’re rare) and as a game piece. Their value is thus subject to crazy swings, valuations which at times are sky-high and then suddenly worthless (such as when a card is banned and no longer tournament legal). “Demand” in card games essentially amounts to such a strange combination of factors as to function like an entirely different kind of commodity. This “dynamism” (can one call it that?) has made card games particularly attractive as a financial asset, often capable of being wildly overvalued (once again, I’m reminded of crypto, though crypto is functionally useless). This need not be the case, though.

Cards, as I mentioned above, are no more than colored cardboard. One could indeed, without too great of an expense, though probably with a reduced quality, print them oneself. There is nothing stopping anyone from making extra copies of particular cards; it doesn’t particularly hurt anyone if you print a card you would never really buy otherwise. This is called “proxying”, that is, making a proxy (a substitute) for a card. Depending on who you play with, it’s perfectly fine; people, despite everything, still want to play the game. But whenever this subject is brought up for serious consideration, many players, and not only the very richest ones, screech with vitriol, as if one were touching upon the dearest of their possessions, and attacking their very sense of self. (It is very funny that Magic 30th is pretty much the first product by Wizards to officially sanction proxies as a good thing since the 90’s.)

Why is that? Why is the prospect of making cards outside the evil booster pack system such a heretical thing to suggest? Surely it is not because players think of the poor designers which will have their labor stolen from them—not at all because most sources seem to indicate that most Wizards of the Coast employees are not very well paid, and one would imagine it would be no different in most other companies. This seems to not raise much of an outcry, and I’d imagine that most players would dislike for designers to be paid more if this would mean that it would become more expensive to play the game (though as it is well known, higher wages eat into shareholder profits; the “wage-price spiral” is utter bullshit made by deranged keynesians worried about workers earning “too much”).

The problem is not merely that the players have to disavow the valueless nature of cardboard in order not to recognize that they have been duped by companies and middlemen into spending a lot of money in essentially worthless paper; rather, players want the cards to have value, they desire the greedy feeling of opening an expensive card in a cheap booster pack, they enjoy the hustle of having a card they bought for cheap skyrocket in price, or to dupe a fool into selling for cheap a valuable card. The game, as I said, is Cardboard Wall Street, not Magic the Gathering or Pokémon. Greed is good, capitalism is delightful, money is the true aim of the game. Or so it seems to be the case. The players want the fetish, they want their commodities to act as if they were alive, their cards to smell like cocaine and champagne, to have the very rarest cards and to be admired for having them.

What props up cardgames, and what props up capitalism itself, is the fetishism inside every single commodity. What makes cards valuable is the cursed way in which every commodity relates to every other commodity inside the minds of every player, and which makes cards first and foremost scarce products, of which some are special and others are not. The “theological niceties” in the rules of the game and in the rules of capitalism make card games the perfect effigy for capitalism, as I said above; it is the psychology, the “magic”¹⁶ in the cards that make them valuable, not the labor that went into their production. They are an unregulated market in which each player competes against each other player in the acquisition of the most desirable cards. And the one with them is, by definition, not only the best player, but also the best human, the greatest, the most powerful, as validated by capitalist society.

The truth is that insofar as card games are made in a capitalist world, they will be like this. And the weight of market madness makes them bloated, creaking under their own fetid weight, where every card is not merely a cool game piece, but a particular amount of money and as such, a token of power. The best and most joyous tendencies of card games, their infinite possibilities, their inventive rules and combinations, their endless replayability are smothered by the desperate need for endless growth of profits, endless growth of production, endless growth of card power, endless growth of playerbase.

As these times increasingly descend into chaos and climate induced collapse, I would suggest that we look toward card games as a particularly sad example of capitalist possibilities strangled by their own contradictions. Whereas they could be a joyful collective experience of each player not only engaging with the existing cards in their own way, and perhaps even making their own cards, and sharing this experience with others, they are cursed, bound to have to be investment portfolios, to have to be “special”, to have to be an object of great desire and great envy. To liberate society is a tremendous task, seemingly nearly impossible; to liberate card games may be, perhaps, quite simpler. Their greatest asset, their cheap production costs, may be also their greatest weakness as a commodity: to liberate card games one merely has to print one’s own. No company in the world can hide away the rules or the images of the cards they produce; the cards are, for all intents and purposes, part of the public good, of the commons; the goal for all card game players ought to be, then, not to have the most complete collection, or the most expensive cards, or the most powerful decks; it ought to be to break the control the cursed fetish has with the distinction between “real” cards and “fake” cards. There is no distinction. They are one an the same: part of the human capacity for inventive play, something that can and will never be fully crushed by the greedy desire for profits.

Footnotes