Collectible Card Games, also known as CCGs and also commonly referred to as TCGs, or Trading Card Games, are a genre of game that have seen an unprecedented rise in popularity, collectibility, and value over the past few decades owing to a variety of factors, ranging from the rise of the collector’s market to the COVID-19 pandemic further popularizing them as an alternative hobby. Names such as Magic: the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, and the Pokemon Trading Card Game are practically household names both in and out of nerd circles. But what many people may not know is that these card games have a history that’s as rich and varied as the games themselves.
IT STARTED WITH TRADE CARDS
Card games themselves have had a long and storied history, dating back to the 1300s, and collectible card games technically have roots in the “trade cards” of the late 1800s and early 1900s, which developed as a result of the rise of multi-color printing and photography . These “trade cards’’ consisted of photographs printed on paper and were first used by businesses and tradesmen to promote their crafts. However, with the meteoric rise in popularity of baseball around the same time, the idea soon came about to make “trade cards” of baseball players that featured their likenesses. The first of these would come about in 1868, when Peck and Snyder, a sporting goods store in New York, began producing “trade cards” featuring entire baseball teams. Soon enough, various companies, primarily tobacco companies, began producing similar cards, usually featuring the players’ likenesses on one side, and an advertisement for their product on the other. It would not be until the 1930s when these cards replaced the advertisements with biographies of the players.
In the 1950s, Topps Chewing Gum Co. began producing cards of not just baseball players, but also football players and even movie and TV stars. This marked when “trade cards” became trading cards, with certain cards, such as the famous Mickey Mantle card, becoming very valuable collector’s items. Despite their being actively collected and traded, which was, perhaps its own “game,” these cards weren’t part of a trading card game like those we know today.
THE MODERN COLLECTIBLE CARD GAME
What we know as the modern collectible card game wouldn’t officially come about until the 1990s. Magic: The Gathering almost never come to be. Wizards of the Coast founder Peter Adkison wanted to release game designer Richard Garfield’s board game Robo Rally but it was too expensive for WotC at the time, so he asked Garfield to come up with a game that could be manufactured cheaply and that people could play while waiting in lines at conventions.
In December of 1991, Garfield created a prototype for a game called Mana Clash. This game, inspired not only by his prior ideas for a game known as Five Magics, but also by the board games Cosmic Encounter and Strat-O-Matic Baseball, was revolutionary in its design. It was designed to be played in short, fifteen to twenty minute bursts with collectible, color-coded cards that would be assembled ahead of time into decks . These cards however, wouldn’t all be obtainable at the same time. Instead, players would start with starter decks and then buy more cards via booster packs. This game would become what we know today as Magic:The Gathering, becoming officially named that when it was published and patented by Wizards of the Coast in 1993.
Its first core set, Limited (most commonly known as Alpha and Beta), printed in August of that year, sold out its initial 2.6 million card stock so fast that Wizards immediately followed it up with second core set of Unlimited, two expansions of Arabian Nights and Antiquities, and a third and fourth core set named Revised and Legends respectively, all of which sold out rapidly. It all but confirmed that the card game market had been changed forever, and that consumers were ready for what would be known forever as the collectible card game AKA CCG for short.
A CCG boom followed in Magic’s wake, as while it continued to put out new expansions and stores struggled to stock enough cards to satisfy hungry consumers, competitors soon arose. Wizard’s direct competitor TSR soon put their own game, Spellfire, on the market, and other companies, such as Donruss, Upper Deck, Fleer, Topps, and Comic Images, threw their hats into the proverbial ring as well, creating a CCG bubble of sorts, a bubble that grew so rapidly that in 1995, 38 new CCGs hit the market, including Doomtrooper, Middle-earth, OverPower, Rage, Shadowfist, Legend of the Five Rings, and SimCity. It’s also in 1995 that the CCG market seemed to slow down just a bit, with Magic somewhat losing steam thanks to the maligned release of Chronicles and the glut of new products failing to fly off the shelves as they had before. Things stabilized over the next couple of years, but the initial boom had seemingly come and gone, with the only major face left being Magic. That is, until two new names entered the ring in 1998 and 2002 respectively:
The Pokemon Trading Card Game, released by Wizards of the Coast in English in 1999 (having been released in 1996 in Japan), and Yu-Gi-Oh, released by Upper Deck in 2002 (after debuting in Japan in 2001), rocked the CCG world, being some of the first card games to not just compete with Magic, but outperform it even! These franchises practically brought CCGs into a proverbial renaissance, and soon franchises such as Naruto, Avatar: The Last Airbender, World of Warcraft, and others entered the CCG market to resounding successes of their own. While Wizards would eventually lose the Pokemon license to Pokemon USA, they would come to once again enjoy success with Magic, especially once their popular Dungeons & Dragons brand was incorporated into it (something which continues to this day, and even the opposite has occurred, with some Magic settings such as Theros and Strixhaven becoming proper D&D settings).
Today, the CCG market is a thriving and diverse one, with the likes of Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic, and others enjoying wild popularity with players and collectors alike, and even transitioning into the digital age practically perfectly, with new ways of collecting and playing them online becoming wildly popular, like Pokemon TCG Online, Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel, and Magic: The Gathering Online.
ABOUT
Play Pixel War, a CRPG (Collectible Roleplaying Game), on Discord, Twitter, or the Web.
This article was written by Pixel Warden, an experienced game creator (design, development, and production) of games with millions of players. He is the founder of Pixel War, an example of a CRPG.
