Collectible card games – Gloomberg News

Pokémon Company Spoiled The TCG By Making One Set Far Too Good

19Jun

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Gaming

Pokémon Company Spoiled The TCG By Making One Set Far Too Good

When it comes to buying Pokémon trading card packs, there’s pretty much one thing that people care about the most: pull rates. What are the chances of getting a special card in any given foil-wrapped packet? And with early 2023's Crown Zenith set, they suddenly got a whole lot better. Then, come the Scarlet & Violet era, they’ve gone and gotten a whole lot worse.12 Marvel Snap Cards That Can Go Into Any DeckPull rates have always varied, and the extremes have more often have existed in the imagination of customers, rather than the hard stats of any given set. However, when it came to the final collection from the three-year-long Sword & Shield (SWSH) era, Crown Zenith, the improvements were unambiguous. Suddenly your chances of pulling a full-art or better went from perhaps one in ...

9Dec

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Gaming

Pokémon Cards Get Rid Of Hideous Yellow Borders After 23 Years

Image: The Pokémon Company / KotakuThe date for the all-new Pokémon Scarlet & Violet TCG cards has been revealed, along with some really excellent news: International cards are losing their godawful yellow borders! Woo-hoo! We’re at last getting the gray/silver Japan enjoys, along with a bunch of other quality-of-life improvements to how cards are laid out.Coming in surprisingly late, given the widespread expectation that we’d see S&V’s first run of cards February 20, it turns out the expansion won’t be officially appearing until March 31.Still, there’s plenty to celebrate about them when we finally do get them, not least the decision to have parity across the card designs in both Japan and internationally, including the far superior (and I will fight you) gray borders, that much b...

19Nov

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Gaming

NFL Pro Retires After Selling Pokémon Card Worth Over $650,000

Photo: Goldin / The Pokémon Company / Kotaku / Eric Espada (Getty Images)Playing in the NFL is tough and many players leave because of career-ending injuries or bad seasons. But after seven years in the league, Las Vegas Raiders linebacker Blake Martinez has retired mid-season for a different reason: He’s making enough money selling Pokémon cards—recently selling a very rare card for nearly $700,000—and doesn’t need the income he gets from playing anymore. Las Vegas Raiders player Blake Martinez shocked many fans when he announced last week that he was retiring from the NFL at the relatively young age of 28. He was first drafted by the Green Bay Packers in 2016. Following four years with Green Bay, he joined the New York Giants in 2020 before suffering a torn ACL in 2021. He was released s...

9Sep

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Gaming

Pokémon TCG’s Lost Origin Expansion Dramatically Changes Game

Photo: KotakuToday is the official launch of the Pokémon Trading Card Game’s Lost Origin expansion, which might be the penultimate set for the Sword and Shield (SWSH) era before next year sees new packs based on Scarlet and Violet. And it marks the return of the Lost Zone, the very occasional mechanic that entirely changes how players approach the game.In the Pokémon TCG, cards that have been dismissed or defeated enter the discard pile. It’s nothing to be proud of, but the game affords all manner of ways for cards to return from this ignominy. Not so the Lost Zone. It is where cards enter, to never return...until that round is over, obviously. Then you just pick them up. They’re fine. It’s just cardboard.So while you may have built up your decks on the basis of retrieving, say, your Energ...

5Sep

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Gaming

Pokémon Has Taken Over My Life, From Games To Cards To Toys

Image: The Pokemon CompanyIn my mid-40s, my life is so latterly being taken over by Pokémon. After falling down the Pokémon GO hole in 2020, and then chronicling its slow takeover of my spare time, I have since found myself the primary Pokémon GO correspondent for Kotaku. And now, as if that weren’t enough, I’ve finally discovered the TCG. RIP my bank balance. Today feels like a good day to have an amiable chat with you about the whole experience.I was exactly the wrong age for Pokémon. In 1997, I had just failed the exams we Brits take to get into university, and was miserably retaking the same subjects I couldn’t comprehend. In 1998, I started a far less ambitious (and ultimately awful) university course. I was a student, just starting my writing career, kissing girls, and playing pool i...

27Jul

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Gaming

A Half-Million Dollar Pokémon Card Heist Just Happened

Photo: Kotaku / Toby WalkerWe’re an odd species, what with our predilection for scarcity, even if that scarce item is a piece of cardboard with a cartoon drawn on it. So it is that 62-year-old South Carolina resident Christopher Polydorou is alleged to have had his home broken into, and his $500,000 Pokémon card collection stolen.Polydorou isn’t just someone who dug out a gem mint collection of cards from his attic and got lucky. The insurance broker, as reported by The Smoking Gun, is a collector of many types of cards, and stores his collections in a temperature-controlled room within his 6,800-square-foot home on the waterfront. The Pokémon cards sat alongside more traditional cardboard compilations, like baseball, football and basketball cards, occupying a dedicated room in the seven-b...