Welcome to the *CG thread, where we talk all manner of Card Games – Collectible, Trading, Living, and otherwise! Feel free to chat amongst yourselves about the card games you’re playing or anything card game-related that strikes your fancy.
In order to play a collectible card game, at some point, you have to collect at least a few cards. But how does one build a collection?
The “traditional” way, if there is one, is to buy packaged products sold by the publisher. Whether this is an LCG set, or a booster pack, or a preconstructed deck, this is the “primary market.”
This tends to be the most expensive way to build a collection, but it is also the most accessible, especially to newer players, who lack the knowledge or connections to get cards through other means. Publishers generally know this, and this is why so many primary market products are targeted at newer players – preconstructed decks that help them get started right away, booster packs that are easy to buy on impulse and open right away to build up that classical conditioning Skinner Box effect, and so on.
In Living Card Games, this can often be the end of things. You buy the set that comes out and it’s yours. There’s a fixed price to getting all the things that you want and you’ve got everything you need. But in games where there’s a random distribution of cards, as soon as you move outside of the realm of preconstructed decks, you start to end up with piles and piles of duplicates. And if you try to build a collection through drafting (which is my preferred method), this problem can end up exacerbated, as you get a lot of the same cards that tend to be good in drafts.
If you want to get out of that cycle, you have to look to the secondary market. While selling cards tends to be a long-tail operation, where most cards are nearly worthless and a few cards can buy you back a significant fraction of a full booster box, buying cards can be the best way for a player with a plan in mind to put together a collection. That long-tail can be a boon, because when certain cards become more expensive, every other card gets less expensive1 – meaning that as long as you’re not dead-set on playing the most popular cards, you can build a respectable, if not top-level competitive, collection.
This week’s prompt: How big is your collection? How do you grow your collection?
Or, as always, feel free to talk about anything going on with you in the world of *CGs.