Get Off My Lawn is a series of articles from guest contributor Ben “ObiWein” Weiner. He said he was going to meet us behind the convenience store to trade some promos later today. I hope he has a foil Leia.
Trading for collectible card games is so amazingly different than it was twenty years ago. The entire process of finding a worthwhile trade partner and putting the actual trade together is like being on another planet now.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, the magazine Scrye included a monthly price guide for Magic: The Gathering. That was the easiest way to compare values between cards. It was also easy to be in a local game store and see that the shop had a single card for sale at some value and another at close to the same value so therefore a trade between two players for those two cards would be roughly fair and balanced.
We were also able to trade based on rarity. Two rare cards were roughly equal just based on their rarity. A Shivan Dragon traded for a Royal Assassin made sense on some level because they were exactly the same odds to be pulled from a pack even if their dollar value was not identical.
I have noticed some things now that are quite different.
First, finding trade partners is no longer limited to a local game store. Back in the mid-to-late 90s, your trading partners were pretty limited to the people you could see in person at a game store or in school. Now with the internet more widely available it is possible to post which cards you have available and what you are looking for, all while the trade partner is hundreds of miles away.
The second impact that the internet, and specifically access to it on mobile devices, has had is that it makes looking up the current actual dollar cost of a card extremely easy. Whether it’s TCGPlayer or eBay, the values can be found very quickly. Rare-for-rare trades basically would not happen today unless the quickly browsed dollar values are the same (or very close to equal).
The third thing is that selling cards is vastly easier now. I was able to sign up as a seller on TCGPlayer and get my bank account verified within a very short amount of time. It was then pretty easy to get a card posted, eventually sold, and then shipped out to the buyer. Now with that money available I could just buy whatever cards I was looking for in the first place. Essentially actual dollars being the ultimate middleman by trading a card for cash, and the cash for new cards.
I have still been able to make some trades in person at the local game store. Those interactions have been fun, even with the extra step of checking pricing on the internet. However, some of the social aspects of face-to-face trading, such as finding a person that physically has the card you are looking for in proximity to where you are located, all feel like they have become lost to a bygone era where rare cards could just be traded for other rare cards.
It’s fun to be back in the card game world. Trading though is certainly different now… and not necessarily for the better.
Oh, and get off my lawn.
Ben is a technology professional by day. He has been an avid gamer for 40 plus years spanning everything from Dungeons and Dragons, board games, and through multiple past and present collectible card games. His non-gaming spare time is spent with his family and playing guitar. Warning: Do not play Jenga for money with this person.
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