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Addiction Markets

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383 points toomuchtodo | 2 comments | 31 Oct 25 17:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.43s | source
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nekusar ◴[31 Oct 25 19:58 UTC] No.45776057[source]▶
People are also leaving out stuff like Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh, and Magic The Gathering.

All of them also introduce rarities (arbitrary exclusiveness), hidden cards in a pack, and extreme gambling gamification.

The only non-gambling MtG packs are the preconstructed commander decks. All 100 cards are published. But the packs and boxes? Pure gambling, especially for the chase rare cards.

And before anyone asks, yes, my username is based after this $2 card. https://edhrec.com/commanders/nekusar-the-mindrazer

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asdff ◴[31 Oct 25 23:02 UTC] No.45777679[source]▶
I feel like it only became rampant in recent years. As a 90s kid no one cared about the card packs. We all assumed they'd be junk cards and a waste of $7 or whatever. No, the move for card people back then was to wait for the card show and just buy the cards you actually want from a card dealer.

The thing is now people are marketing the pack opening. You have social media accounts of them pulling cards from packs and getting all hyped up about it. Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s but thats because the unboxing as an experience wasn't marketed by anyone at all. People just wanted cards they thought were personally cool in some way.

And likewise expansion of markets in the internet era means people start to have shared values of what is a valuable card based on market price vs just being interested in some certain cards out of your own interest.

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lurk2 ◴[31 Oct 25 23:36 UTC] No.45777891[source]▶
> Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s

How old was everyone in the 1990s? Kids loved this kind of thing in the 2000s.

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asdff ◴[31 Oct 25 23:57 UTC] No.45778016[source]▶
I can't imagine kids even liked it then. Again most of those packs were junk cards. Like total crap cards. Oh gee a rattata and some energy cards. All you wanted was Ash's squad from the shows.
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1. lurk2 ◴[01 Nov 25 00:22 UTC] No.45778159[source]▶
The kids I knew who played these kinds of card games all loved buying booster packs, but they weren’t paying for these packs themselves and most grew out of playing by the time they reached high school. I can see it not being as fun for adult players who understand the probability metagame being played, but I think one of the reasons these games had so much financial success in the first place was that they identified a behavioral loop that they could exploit, exactly like contemporary developers did with loot boxes.
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2. Fomite ◴[01 Nov 25 06:53 UTC] No.45779725[source]▶
I loved buying booster packs and trying to make decks from the janky cards in them, until people taking it all Very Seriously came along.