Comment by zoeysmithe
2 months ago
Yep this. We should be fighting 'pay to win' systems like this. Afterall the wealthy person who can afford these rare cards will have a natural advantage.
Imagine if dnd was sold in a way that only a few player's handbooks had fireball and if you had it, you could cast it.
Its a shame these systems caught on instead of more ethical systems. I hope Gen Z ends up burying this consumerist junk.
Pokemon is significantly better at this than other trading card games (like Magic):
- The rarest cards in every set are usually just alternate art versions of other, more common cards from the set.
- They release products with more powerful cards that have become popular recently, to increase the supply.
- They release good decks based on what is popular in tournaments at a good price ($25-$40, iirc).
- They release copies of tournament winning decks at a really good price (like, $15 for the whole deck). These are proxy cards—they have a different back, they, don't have foil, the printing isn't as high quality. But if you wanted to try out a good deck, they're incredibly cheap.
TCGs are inherently predatory, but Pokemon seems to realize it's played mostly by kids.
Not just wealthy, but also the charismatic. The couple of weeks when I knew about baseball cards and they were still something anyone cared about, I realized that one of the kids I knew was trying to sweet-talk everyone into trading them one card we had for a few cards he had.
I had no idea what the meaning of the trade was, I just knew that I was probably being tricked, based on the vibes he was putting out. And that was the last time I was interested in loot boxes.