The Trading Card Industry has CHANGED. 

Sorcery artwork is very beautiful. If i was going to try another game other than mtg then that would be the one.

Strange how Louie and company have no idea the impact yugioh had on tcgs

I don't think Magics main problem is the commander focus. Many people are unhappy with the product flood of wotc and their collaborations with other IPs and if you ever tried playing other TCGs you have to admit that gameplay mechanically there a lot of games that make fun besides Magics not drawing a land for 3 turns and loosing 🙃

Wizards: guts competitive play, releases a slew of nonstop product, raises prices constantly and a whole other bevy of shitty practices (M30, Pinkertons, etc) "It's because of commander players that 1v1 is dying" 😂

I love SWU. It eliminated all the aspects i dont like about Magic. Manafloading, Mana screwed, dead cards etc. Its not as complex as swccg (i love swccg btw) but has a decent depth while beeing learned very quickly. The Games are short and actionpacked.

The biggest issue with most of these games is distribution. I've played a ton of ccgs over the last 30 years. Magic is the only one that was easily availble in various locations. Now we see FaB a decent amount. Lorcana is easy to find as well right now. LCGs were easy enough to preorder, but for me that was just easier to get when preordering everything. SW is doing okay, but its a pain to get in stock. Sorcery is dead outside of Toronto here because nobody could get any stock. I just ended up printing it up bootlegged via a card printer and making cubes to play.

It's amazing to me how many "old school" Magic players picked up Sorcery. (and for those that really loved that "old" Magic feeling, start playing Sorcery)

you're young, that's why you have the perspective you do, imo. As a person 10 years-ish older than you, you weren't really around gaming in the early 2000s. We ALL had second and third games. We are seeing a second super popular wave of TCGs, and that's awesome. BUT Back in the day, I played Magic as my main game, Legend of the Five Rings(old school) as my second game, and Star Wars Decipher as my third game. Plenty of people did similar things. It's just that from the late 2000s a lot of these games died, especailly when Hasbro really changed Magic a lot. We're now seeing a similar thing as that late 90s/early 2000s time IMO You should look at some of the Gen Con and other big gaming event numbers back in those days, pre-internet, we had 300+ at events for L5R/Star Wars, while Magic was putting on 500-600 person events

as a long time magic player i fell in love with Lorcana its even better when the wife is getting into it to

Star Wars had a TCG it was called Young Jedi. It was cool to play with MTG, then it failed. Star Trek had a TCG. It was cool to play with MTG, then it failed. Legend of then Five Rings etc etc. The more things change the more they stay the same. -40 year old card player out😅

Industry has changed to everyone chasing the fomo dragon looking for the the next "alpha/beta" TCG's are doing what MMO's did in the early 2010's. THere will be a bunch of early adopters, but they will all run to whatever the next new thing is leaving a bunch of TCG's dead in their wake.

Always good to get your take. I saw the Professor on whatnot today talking positively about sorcery and he mentioned wanting to do a video on it.

I think you got about 50% of the answer on Magic. The other 50% is mostly covered by its online interfaces. The game is cannibalizing itself, which does leave more room to the other TCGs.

Awesome that all these new TCGs are bringing new players and lapsed MTG players back into the TCG hobby! I hope a good portion of the new TCGs stick around for years to come👍

I mean yeah, it could be the lack of competitive 1v1 in magic - but what really stopped me from investing further into booster packs was the decisions the hasbro leader board made in the past. Haven't bought a single product from them this year and they're making it easy.

I feel that the CCG/TCG market is going through what the miniature game market has gone through. It's gone from the one massive game/company to multiple successful games with people playing multiple systems.

for me, sitting down to 1v1 is no fun. because so many are so competitive i have almost no chance of winning unless i spend a arm and leg. sitting down for commander. everyone is watching eachother so i have a higher chance of winning, and of having more fun with what happens during the game.

Magic has pushed players out, which other games are capitalizing on. Dropping pro-tour and neglecting standard pushes out the competitive event grinders. Releasing sets every 6 weeks pushes out people who don't want to be required to constantly keep up with the new OP cards. Jacking up prices on packs and hiding all the big hits behind $30+ collector packs keeps people with limited income and more importantly prevents kids who want to spend their allowance on packs from getting into the game. WotC has made their bed, now they have to deal with better games creeping into the market.

I actually just started magic, my whole group has, we have been enjoying it.

We are currently in a junk wax Era of TCGs again. There are too many competitors in a tight market. So that being said in which part of the junk wax era are we and will MtG die off? The answer is no one actually knows and everyone who claims the opposite is trying to sell you stuff.

I think that the internet is honestly the biggest change in this. Not just it's existence but the ability for smaller projects to get off the ground and have support. Forums for discussion, networks to find live play, tournament support on 3rd party sites, all of these are SO much easier now than even in the 00s. in the 10s we had a lot of flare ups, game of thrones was a hit, older star wars games saw powerful short runs, i think Naruto had a good IP for a minute. The other big impact on players is just how popular card games are with video games. marvel snap, hearthstone, all the gatcha games that are kinda cardgame like, slay the spire. When I was in HS it was a bizzare thing for some of my friends to get into, now they are hosting commander nights. It's a shifting landscape and I dont think we can really blame WotC totally. they coulda done better for sure, but no way have they ever, or will they ever be the only game in town

I wish I enjoyed Commander. It's obviously the most popular Magic format, and quite a lot of people enjoy it very much, but I just can't stand it. Magic already suffers from some archaic game mechanics, and it seems fairly clear that the game at its inception wasn't really intended for a multiplayer format. Making more and more products conform to the Commander format helped improve it for certain, but it's still a clunky mess of a game that often just drags on too long unless you're that guy who gets eliminated early and stands around for an hour while everyone else finishes the game, not that games ending abruptly via an infinite combo that goes off just a few turns into the game is any more enjoyable. In any case, I don't begrudge anyone for their enjoyment of the format. In fact, I envy them. As popular as it is, I really, really wish I enjoyed it. The only Magic I enjoy though I basically have to play online because locals for 1v1 competitive formats just don't exist around here. A new multiplayer format I did have a good bit of fun with recently though is Twin Suns for SW:U. While I still greatly prefer the game 1v1, the Twin Suns format was a really refreshing take on a multiplayer rule set. Player engagement is a lot better with the one action per player turns moving the game along at a fairly brisk place, and the game ending at the end of the round in which a player has been eliminated is a much better mechanic to resolve the game finale. I was quite surprised at how well the game flows for a multiplayer format.

Very interesting video. Looking forward to jumping into some of these new games myself soon

I'm not sure if this is a change. In the late 90s early 2000s I had 10 different tcgs in my deck bag and played at least a tournament a month at my lgs for like 6 of the games. I think the issue now is that mtg players aren't just sticking their nose up at other games. That is making the grind to start new games way easier. Personally I'm still worried about the risk of SW unlimited. I bought SW Destiny and FFGs L5R. It's great to hear your stretching out your games.

i think you make a great point there and that things have changed to lean more into the direction you are describing 😁👊🏻!

We run a store in the Netherlands and Star Wars has been on fire here as well, totally agree with your analysis!

OMG that guy trying to buy out all your star wars was at my LGS. a lot of stores around here, North east Ohio refuse to sell him anymore. guy has bought probably 30 cases.

Arena is replacing 1v1 in paper. Those other games would face the same problem if they were playable on mobile.

I think the demand for all those new card games will slow down. Just look at Flesh and Blood. Everyone wants to invest in that new "first edition", hoping it will become the next Magic's Alpha Edition, where a Display will be worth serious money in 20 to 30 years...

Buried the lead. MTGArena is cannibalizing 1v1 paper magic. Love playing on MTGA but wish there were more opportunities to play paper locally.

I feel like Magic has certainly changed direction, not everybody is happy with the loss of blocks, power creep, the edition of so much outside media, and with how many different versions of a single card can exist in a single set, but generally people still love playing it causally. Which is why commander is still thriving. I recently opened a shop with a few buddies, and we have noticed similar trends. It is hard to fire off an FNM, but we constantly have people inside playing commander, and other card games such as One Piece, Sorcery, and Lorcana. Though in our store in particular we have a decent number of competitive players so we do see a lot of people causally playing Modern, Pioneer, and CEDH. Though, I think this has a lot to do with the fact that Proxies are not considered a faux pas in these play groups. I think another big part in this is other people just getting better at designing card games. One Piece is just Dragon Ball Super with some minor changes, its success likely has a lot to do with lessons learned from DBS. Meanwhile Lorcana is almost identical to Magic, but it addresses one of its biggest problems, that being the inconsistency of the land based mana system. We also see this in the digital space with Hearthstone, World of Warcraft had a TCG before that, and it did have a few similar mechanics but it didn't end up being successful, but they really refined them for Hearthstone. If a game is going to attract players to it, it can't just be mechanical. It needs to be mechanically interesting and allow for creativity and flavor in deck design. One of my favorite card games of all time was the Naruto TCG that got discontinued back in 2013 despite it doing super well state side. That game nailed its themes and mechanics and they were distinctly different than just about anything else on the market, both at the time and now. The cards are still super collectable with some going for over $200.

What I'm curious about is the player base attrition rate. If the average age of an MTG or most TCGs players is around 30ish absent of kids or marriage what does this hobby look like 10 years from now. My 15 year old plays video games, is into medieval Game of Thronesy fantasy lure, anime and all the rest but has 0 interest in my cardboard hobby nor do any of his friends lol in schools there are chess teams. Chess has survived through the ages. Pokémon in my opinion is the only TCG that stays young without losing its original base to other similar TCGs. RIP metazoo lol its a bearish outlook of the future and I haven't always felt that way

Have these guys never heard of Yugioh? Most of my peers growing up were heavily into yugioh and casually into Pokémon and no one that I knew played Magic. Different generations I guess

I remember the Rage werewolf card game, that was pretty cool, and Vampire: The Eternal Struggle ccg. I started with magic and tried these 2 early games but ultimately played magic from 1994-2019, sold my collection for well over 6 figures. I miss the cardboard crack so much though.....Nowadays I play MTG Online & MTG Arena, but I do miss the smell of vintage cards, I miss my 27 completely foiled out modern decks, and I really miss my vintage deck. Never owned a black lotus, but i did have 2 time walks, a mox jet, over 50 mox diamonds, plenty of duals, many summer magic cards, and a playset of beta lightning bolts signed by the late legendary Christopher Rush.

I think after the TCG boom, and the effects after it have made people realize that the TCG space is not just limited to the big 3. I think the collecting side of card games plays more of an impact than some people realize. People want to buy things that are going to retain value. Good games coming out, with the combination of them holding their value have made people realize that the possibilities for so many more great games are massive.

Is Beavis hosting the video today? “Fire” “fire” “firing”

I love the content you put out, but your utter lack of awareness of past TCG's is staggering. You open the video saying there were no successful TCG's other than Magic and Pokemon pre-2020. They were the most successful, but YuGiOh has always had a strong following. WoW TCG, L5R, Vs System, Final Fantasy TCG, Duel Masters, DBZ TCG, Force of Will, and Various Fantasy Flight CCGs all had their time in the sun where you could attend tournaments and find games locally. And those are just the ones I'm familiar with. It's always been common for players to have a main game they invest energy into, and side-games they play when they can. All that's changing is Magic losing it's foothold as the premium game for competitive play. Past TCG's struggled to attract the Spikes because the PT, GP, and PTQ system provided everything a Spike needed. Competitors were forced to offer excessive prize purses to get attention, and couldn't sustain interest. WotC pioneered player engagement through the LGS (and local groups outside of the LGS) with things like FNM and the Arena program before it. Now that WotC has turned away from competitive players, some are looking for the competitive experience elsewhere. New Spikes have no reason to even look at Magic in 2024 when FNM doesn't fire but newer games do. I hope you continue to stay open minded to new games because the big lesson of TCG history is that even popular games eventually come to an end, waiting to be replaced by the next fun experience.

i havent even heard of Star wars unlimited in any of my LGS. i had to ask and its seems to be dead over here in California.

Louie, I love that I discovered your channel organically through my trail of MTG Video recommendations. Do you ship to Las Vegas??

In the early 2000's it was really common for people in my region to play a half dozen different games on weekends. Friday was always for Magic and Sunday was for Pokemon in a lot of stores around but other than that we were willing to play anything. I'm not sure the industry has changed or we're reliving a similar time where these new games are just around until they're not. I'm not sure I see more than 2 new companies (at most) being around in 3-5 years. If you're a fan of card games, you're having a good time right now so enjoy it while your can

Magic being "bad" aside.. it is an OLD game and it feels it's age. Problem is, there hasn't been a designer to elevate TCGs to make the contrast noticeable.

My oldest son and I started playing Magic back in 1994. Both of my sons and friends I still have drafts and also play Commander. We buy some sealed boxes when they are on sale and have drafts and buy Commander decks. My oldest son is also playing Sorcery and Lorcana. Our group is also playing D&D on Sunday, Monday, & Wednesday nights. The problem with WOTC is that there are too many products and the price increases are getting ridiculous. The card quality now is not good and most of the time you do not get enough value out of a sealed box. Magic is still a great game but the prices of cards go down with so many reprints. We wait a few months to buy some singles. Thank you for the video.

People are playing Magic on MTGO or Arena....

I kinda like it though, I’ve been designing a card game for a few years and am finally rounding the corner on getting it published!

You lost me at two years ago and no other card game lol. yugioh is a horrible game but still very very popular.

Why do people equate 'one-on-one' with 'competive'? I've never played anything but casual games of Magic and it's always been one-on-one. I have zero interest in commander because to me it feels restrictive compared to the really casual ways of playing the game I think this is why me and many other people look at other games for what we used to find in Magic. Wizards is willing to bet all their chips on one version of the game inatead of supporting what made Magic so great in the firat place-the inherent variety of ways to play it, allowing people to play it however they like. It was precisely this freedom that gave birth to commander in the first place. I'm not against commander or the people playing it but I can't help but feel left out when all everyone wants to play these days is either commander or competitive games and I don't want to play either. It's great that games like Grand Archive or Digimon exist. Yeah-many people play them competitively but you can play casually if you want and you don't have to adhere to ridiculous deck building rules or ban lists, and you're not forced into multiplayer.

If wotc were to go back and only print cards in retro frames and add some cards to the reserved list to create value again, then the game would make a comeback. And return to the old style of artwork too. Make the game great again.

One thing that also might be at play is that the community that grew up playing Magic in the 90s are now grown up and affluent enough to dive into other card games, enough to the point where those games can be supported far more than they could've been in the 90s and early 00s. When Magic came out you had to choose between spending your $20 that month on the one card game that every single one of your friends was playing, or be one of two people getting into Middle Earth from ICE hehe. But those kids grew up and have disposable income, if Magic doesn't offer what they want, well, those folks can drop $300 on Star Wars or Sorcery instead.

Nailed it with the Commander. Wizards has been chasing short-term gains catering to the commander format at the cost of stability of eternal formats and 1v1 play. We'll see if it is worth it in the long term.

I feel like once we can figure out a way to monetize commander or in a way provide a product or services around commander then we will be to the moon. We just gotta turn that next corner for LGSs. Where there’s a will there’s a way.

Im a long time Magic player, 20 + years. I still love the game and enjoy commander. I tried out Flesh and Blood and really enjoyed it. But im going to stick with Magic because I just cant afford two games.

I've played tcgs for over 25 years and never played magic. I always found it annoying when I would go to an lgs and all they cared about was magic.

Do you have a crimson Vow 12 pocket binder lefT?

It’s weird to see other card games outperform magic on Friday nights. Went to a draft a couple months ago at a bigger local store and there were more people playing digimon and Pokémon than magic. It really scared me to see that, I remember the room being full of mtg players and seeing a couple smaller groups for the other games. I hope what I saw was a fluke

star wars ultimate is taking off like crazy at my lgs prices are up and to the right feels good.

I agree with much of what you say. I would say the Bandai games can be very profitable having made really good profit margins off of yugioh especially. Vanguard was good at the time as well. Where I agree with you most is magic had gotten away from the competitive play resulting in less deep of game and has cast a wider web appealing to a more casual format that is easy and welcoming to get into. The deeper rooted magic player are looking for a good competitive environment and few games have been able to appeal to that. I am open to Lorcana and I want to love Star Wars but I just can’t support fantasy flight based on previous results with multiple games. Flesh and blood is great but very depth and daunting for a newer tcg player. Love the content keep it up.

As someone who has played EDH since 2010, it really hurts to see the format being pushed so hard that it’s warped the game itself. Everything was better for the game when EDH was a casual format for cards that were useless in 1v1 matches.

Hey, a fellow West Virginian! I'll have to give you a subscribe.

honestly this is why I love canlander. 100 cards, singleton, its like commander but more fluid, more aggressive (and more expensive unfortunately..) and just lets you build more fun stuff. Wish it would take off harder. The canlander community likes to forget you don't NEED 10 points in every deck, thus saving costs, but no color identities so you can realistically run whatever tf you want if you keep it consistent/competitive. Its like a whole new world of mtg, and its 1v1! 1v1 canlander made me realize how surprisingly strong or weak my regular commander decks were when I simply shuffled my commander with the 99. like fae dominion, an ok precon, but absolutely DESTROYS when its 1v1. one could argue because a lot of edh decks have the commander as the wincon/strategy, but even so, its just a new world, I suggest trying it before hopping off to another cardgame!

Well said!

Would love to try Sorcery as an ex-Magic player. Can't get any product though

What's up with Cole's and SWU? My local shops judge is Cole. My friends shop in another state has a Cole that's the judge as well.

I started Lorcana because Magic drafts never fired off. I actually have people to play with now.

Damn didn't realize my dude was a fellow Mountaineer

Magic screws themselves by making every product focus on commander as the main priority. I'm so happy with the play boosters so I no longer get commander cards in it. Commander started out by just using the cards available they didn't need a specific card made for them. Why wizards started doing that and making everything legendary is just ridiculous

Not going to like, I got beat by an Emrakul deck and now I only play Pauper. I think that strong mtg decks have just gotten too expensive so people pick up a more volatile format like Commander where their tier-3 deck might win against a tier-1 deck occasionally.

Let's go! 🎉😊

I love seeing people wake up and step away from Magic the game is a dumpster fire

I wish your store was my LGS

For me it was the game resource mechanics. Magic can leave you turn after turn of not being able to do anything because of bad luck drawing lands. When you get to certain resource threshold land cards in hand get worthless. The new games use a better system of turning regular cards into the resources you need to play other cards. It feels like I can do something each turn playing Lorcana while Magic Commander has left me frustrated way too many times and pulling all the fun out of playing.

I feel like Star Wars is so niche cause nobody’s playing it in mid MO. At least it’s not popular out here

I have been playing TCG's for a lot less time than maybe some of the people here, I started around New Challengers in Yu-Gi-Oh and Khans block in MTG. However I got out of Magic around War of the Spark and card games in general. Recently in the last few months I have been wanting to start playing Magic again. My perspective as someone returning to the game and wanting to play magic again is that a lot of the game just feels worse to play. I was going to pick up a standard deck and play FNM locally, but then I found out the local store I played at does Modern FNMs instead which I didn't know was an option now, and Modern is too expensive to play, so I looked up the latest RCQ thinking I could just play that, but it's a Pioneer format event, which is fine because I'd be okay with playing Pioneer, but the fact that Standard as a format feels entirely dead at least in my area is bizarre to me given that it is literally Standard. The actual game feels extremely split which it didn't when I started playing. You had Standard which was the normal format, Eternal players who played both standard and Eternal usually, and the fringe commander players that were mostly just casual players, but now the tournament scene which is what interested me seems to be very split and the products are pretty confusing. Why is LotR modern legal, but Fallout isn't? How would I even know that. It genuinely almost feels easier to start over in a new card game than it does to pick magic back up having been out of the game for a while. Maybe I'm just confused and don't understand it as well as I thought I did, but I've played a lot of tournaments and travelled a lot and Magic in particular just feels so different.

During the pandemic mtg players came back to find mtg no longer what it was in the 1990s - they still want to play cards but not mtg anymore. They took their wallets to play newer games like FAB, Sorcery, etc., and not going back to mtg. Store owners already know this and are moving to follow soon.

Shout out to sorcery!

besides commander magic lacks stuff like challenger and starter decks and really suffers from it

Your video is pretty deceiving. You playing before the strore perhaps wasnt that long ago? I can name endless games that had tournaments, more demand than Sorcery or Loranca, and a larger player base from various years ago - going all the way back to 1994 (and thats not including Pokemon). From a real MTG OG: This is nothing new, its just history repeating itself.

Grand Archive TCG!!

Kind of a bummer that your store is like that. I don’t really like commander.

No investment in any new product besides a single booster case until they have a proven 10 year of steady sales

I've decided to stick with independent TCG's. Small groups of passionate developers create great games. Boardrooms create commodities.

Magic is dead. The investors don't realize it yet, but the players have moved on.

Yugioh: Am I a joke to you?

Thankfully one store in West Virginia is actually not a big enough sample size to determine player trends. If you only listened to Louie you would think Modern was actually dead lol

I think you are making a very critical mistake in your logic. Magic has not taken market share from anyone at all, they've probably lost significant % of market share. They do however probably have significantly more players, due to the amount of tcg players expanding tremendously in the last 3-5 years. Like random numbers, imagine they had 40% of the market of 10 million TCG Players world wide, now it might be 30% of 30 million.

Magic is just too slow and complex for me. I'm pretty new to TCG's, and I went to three "How to play Magic" events because I learn by repetition, and I don't get to play much because of work. I picked up several other TCG's the first time playing them. Not to the point where I was good, but I at least understood what was happening on the board and what I needed to do.

Bro, I think you're a decade late to the party. I have played multiple TCGs for my entire life almost. I started playing Yugioh as a child when it first released in the US and I have played somewhere around 10-15 different games, MTG included. They have all had scenes and communities playing local tournaments. At one of my local game stores there have been multiple times where a game we were playing was out performing Magic in terms of sales and tournament participates on a weekly basis. Yugioh for a number of years, Naruto tcg for it's entire run time until it stopped being printed due to licensing issues with Bandai and Bandai US, Force of Will for an admittedly short number of years, and now Lorcana and One Piece. Magic has always been there and always consistent in producing numbers and players, but it hasn't been the only game on the block for 10-15 years.

dude they killed standard. when they make standard good again ill be back. but even now its boring, dull, and not supported enough by Wizards. I get nothing for playing standard now.

I was heavy into Magic from about 1994 to 2002 then lost interest. During that time we also heavily played Decipher LOTR and Star Wars. I tried to get back into Magic as a collector last year with their LOTR release but the box opening experience/collecting left me wanting something more. Because of the RU-vid algorithm some video I had watched on Magic LOTR brought up a Sorcery video for me and I happily fell down that rabbit hole instead and Magic disappeared for me again.

Commander ruined MTG.

No one plays anymore, just investment and flipping. No one cares anymore, let's flip and collect a few.

Magic players stay acting like Yugioh isn't 50 times bigger lmao

Magic sucks and they've opened the door for all these card games to take the market! I think the truth is that Magic has purposely alienated their traditional "classic" playerbase and these former players who love classic fantasy, etc. have now turned to other games like Sorcery, etc. to fill that void that MTG used to fill. Modern MTG and WOTC simply does not care about the players that built up MTG to its high original heights. This DOES open the door for games like FAB, Sorcery, etc. to be more successful. Hand in hand with this, MTG faces more and better (i.e. more competent) competition these days than it did in the past. These are the two main factors as to why when you go into an LGS you will see a wide variety of TCGs as opposed to the old days when MTG was pretty much it. I don't like to be too negative, but to me MTG as I knew it is long gone. Current MTG just isn't for me, I think Sorcery captures what MTG used to represent. Hope Sorcery sticks to their vision going forward.

MTG will outlive Sorcery, Grand Archive, Star Wars, and Lorcana, just like MetaZoo. Change my mind

There is just too much shit in MTG now, a million art variants, a million different sets, tons of Fortnite/Brawl garbage infecting the game with all these "Universes beyond", everything has become special so now nothing is. I've been slowly selling everything in my collection and just keeping my decks/reserve list cards. I started playing Yugioh Goat/Edison and it's so much more chill than current magic, and somehow the new special treatments and variations exist less and easier to keep up with.

what a clown that doesnt realize yu-gi-oh was/is the biggest tcg for like a decade