It has been a few weeks since the Shonen Jump hosted by Konami for its blockbuster Trading Card Game Yu-Gi-Oh!. With, what Konami reports, 900 plus attendees at the event, one finds himself very easily stating the obvious.....Yu-Gi-Oh! is alive and well.
In this humble writer's opinion, I don't even think that Konami expected such a huge turn out. This means great things for the TCG community at large. Obviously, duelists are still out there and looking for competition. Definitely, duelists are willing to make their ways to venues to seek competition and to test their deck building skills. Possibly, there is room for other games to make a beachhead into what must be considered the strongest of the TCGs.
If you visit the local card stores you will find the usual suspects. You will find Magic The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh! and World of Warcraft among others. On any given afternoon or weekend, there is always competition to be found be it a local tournament ranging from 4 to 16 combatants, or just friendly people looking for a new face to introduce to the game that they enjoy so much. Local card shops are hosting events weekly. Social media outlets such as Meetup.com and Facebook.com have listings for every game possible. On-line auction sites have single cards for sale ranging from cents to hundreds of dollars. The TCG games are enjoying exposure unlike anything they have ever seen.
When one compares each TCG to the others, the collector finds a miriad of play options. Diversity is definitely a strength of the industry. A collector can not only complete his or her set for competition, but they can find themselves collecting card of all sorts for the beauty of the artwork, the rarity of the card itself or to complete an entire collection of the latest booster drop. In fact, a well rounded collector of TCGs can find competition in just about every city in North America from San Diego , California to Edmonton, Alberta. Log on to any of the sites, or the plethora of pop-up sites that ride the wave of following created by the hosts sites themselves, and a person can easily find themselves a game in minutes. Then, low and behold, the professional leagues have emerged. Competition that can have rewards in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and prizes to the playing field. One can only wonder the amounts to which the payouts will climb and the luck of the draw that will create tomorrow's champions.
The only real worry that the TCG community has is, when will the player base plateau? When does the game reach saturation? Have we already come to this point or is there so much more room out there that the TCG community has but to sit back and wait for the next challenge at the next regional or national championship. Is there enough of a true effort out there by the makers of these great games to continue the upward climb for the industry?
Konami has reclaimed its distribution rights for Yu-Gi-Oh! in Europe from Upper Deck Entertainment and with the recent success of Shonen Jump! Anaheim, it appears to be in great shape.
Magic the Gathering, with its natural following from all things Wizards of the Coast continues its strong play with the latest release of the Planes Walker expansion.
World of Warcraft continues to push the Dark Moon Faires with success. The natural following from the MMORPG doesn't hurt either. The newest expansion, Blood of the Gladiators, partnered with the regional qualifiers in sealed deck format ensure solid sales and participation from the local card shops that supported the UDE product.
It seems that at this point, the intellectual and creative aspects of the TCGs are covered. The artwork has never been better. The diversity, as I have already mentioned, is expanding at a solid pace with each quarterly release. The collectibility can send your head spinning as you scramble to find cards with ferocity not seen since your father's attempts at locating the famed Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris. Inventories remain readily available.
The only wild card left seems to be the middleman.
The card shop.
I have always been very curious to learn what the card shop honestly views as their place in this wondrous soup of an industry. Do they see themselves as leaders, do they feel themselves as stewards of the TCG community or do they simply view themselves as the provider of the addiction of choice for us and our friends?
If I may be so bold, the card shops seem to be in a precarious position. As the TCG distributors jockey for market share and the collector searches for his or her next match, the card shop makes attempts to appease both. But what happens when they come into conflict? What happens when the community of duelists from one TCG begins to push out the purveyors of another? With the limited space in card shops, and the card shop owners attempts, rightfully so, to maximize his or her revenues with a majority of the square footage dedicated to product, what happens?
Eventually, the TCG of choice or conversation needs to push beyond the card store. Eventually players will begin asking for events larger than 10 to 20 duelists. Eventually, as these great games grow, the space will become a premium. Preferred Friday nights and Saturday afternoons will become as hot a commodity and sometimes as hard to find as the Foam Sword Rack in a booster pack of Blood of the Gladiators. Especially, when you take into account the fact that the games that we enjoy so much take so damn long to play in tournament format. Rarely shorter that 8 hours for a regional swiss format of 16 or more participants.
The natural growth of the games will need to take it from the shops and into the community in another format or another location. If the TCG community ever expects to expand beyond the group of 10 or 12 on Saturday afternoon to 32 to 64 Sunday morning at 9am, then the locales have to change.
What does this then mean for the shops? Unfortunately, the store is then somewhat left in the lurch, or is it? Is there a way for the store to take advantage of this situation? I guess the real question is, is the store ready or willing to make the jump? What about the independent tournament organizer? Is there an opportunity for partnership or will it be outright competition for the fledgling organizers and the communities they attempt to create?
No doubt these are the questions that have to be asked and answered over the next year if the TCG community is going to make the leap from past time to prime time.
My only hope is that these questioned are asked and answered in response to growth and not in response to death.
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