We've had collectable cards for ages. Baseball cards, garbage pail kids, etc. Those you couldn't even play a game with, you just tried to collect and trade. Honestly even MTG and Pokemon cards are so much better than mobile games which are there 24/7 begging for attention and making kids feel like they're missing out if they don't check in every few hours. Plus with the cards in the end, you've got a collection of cards you can play with, sell, or keep for the memories or whatever. With digital stuff you'll be lucky if you can still access in your ingame purchases after a few years

When I was a kid with no money and no game stores nearby, I “collected” Pokémon cards by pasting JPEGs from the web into Corel Wordperfect documents stored on my stack of 3.5″ floppies.

And the worst you can do is to buy all of Walmart's stock of cards, while digital stuff has no upper limit

I think there is real option of buying worthless fakes online for overinflated price of real one...

> Baseball cards

Which were originally included in packs of cigarettes!

Correction: Were so much better. Now that WotC are selling thousand-dollar booster boxes and concentrate most of a set's value in a few mythic rare premium foil cards, they're basically lottery tickets by another name. There was never a sudden change, the monetisation just got slightly more predatory every year.

Maybe it has something to do with Digital vs Physical?

If I get a rare card from a booster pack, I physically own that card.

But say I use something like Maplestory cubing as an example. Cubes allow you to reset % stats on an item, and I think they're like $1-$2 per cube, depending on the cube. I can easily blow through hundreds of cubes trying to get a perfect roll.

However, no matter how much I pay I will never have ownership over that item.

CCGs are a pale shadow to these gambling games. Beyond that, I think there are some important differences:

* There's no "free". You must spend money at the outset in order to play. This sets precedent and expectations.

* There's a physical good involved. You always get something, and you've got total freedom with how you use it. You can play it, sell it, trade it, turn it into an origami crane, use it as a proxy for a different card, etc.

* Because people can sell cards, this means you can simply buy the exact cards you want without resorting to randomized packs.

* Buying a randomized pack is a much more involved—both physically and psychologically—process compared to an IAP. At your local game shop, you have to go up to the counter, ask for one or more packs, and hand over your money/card. If you want more, you have to do it all over again. With an IAP, you just tap the "OK" button.

Additionally:

* Once the bottom falls out, bag-holders get burned, but the collective nightmare is over.

I think the scale is also different. You can’t quite formulate a CCG game that requires 10 copies of charizard to be strong (counterexamples abound for sure). you can’t drip feed 2 new characters every couple of weeks while still doling out the same trash that you’ve been giving since day 1 99% of the time.

>Because people can sell cards, this means you can simply buy the exact cards you want without resorting to randomized packs.

that's actually one reason TCG markets don't get cateforized. They don't have a "market price" for any one card. They let the fans set that. There are plenty of 3rd party market places where you can buy a specific card but you'll never find the company endorsing them. They only sell booster packs for a set value. They can give lists of what's in a booster pack and even categorize them by rarity, but they never actually give the card a price.

Pokemon TCG is the new Tulip in 2023 Japan. Many people buy pack and scalp it. All 7/11 have a poster that indicates "there's no pokemon card stock!". Insane scalped price for a new rare card. Many third party shops sell their original repack. They also buyout cards so that is almost a gambling.