I had an encounter at a Lorcana event at my local game store the other day that seemed very strange to me. A guy walked up to me holding a holographic Tinker Bell, Giant Fairy, and asked if I was interested in trading. I said yes, and he asked for a holographic Donald Duck, Strutting His Stu🌠ff. As the Donald owner, I wouldn’t have offered this trade. Donald is just a common, while Tinker Bell is a super rare and a highly playable card. But he offered the card, and asked for the trade, so I accepted.
Then he asked if I’d be willing to pay the difference in cash, and when I looked over, he had side-by꧃-side graphs for the market price of both cards. On TCGPlayer, a cold foil Donald is worth about $2, while the Tinker Bell is listed at $26. He asked for $24 - the difference between the two cards - a🍰nd it occurred to me he wasn’t trying to trade, but rather get me to buy his card. I offered to trade him some additional foils, and he stood there for a while looking up the price of each one, until he gave up, frustrated, and walked away.
Forgive me for sounding like a boomer, but back in my day folks didn’t need to analyze a graph of market trends in order to make a fair trade. When I was tradi🍸ng Pokemon cards on the playground, a fair trade was any one where both kids walked away happy with what they got. Sure, you tried to make sure your friends didn’t get taken advantage of - no one should be trading away their first edition shadowless Charizard for a Rattata no matter how much they love the purple rat - but no one was ever worried about the exact market value of every card when th💟ey made a trade, and no one ever asked for cash to make up the difference.
I’ve been out of the TCG scene for a long time, so I asked Twitter and Discord what they thought about that interaction and got some pretty mixed responses. Some people thought this was a totally normal way to conduct trades, and everyone should always aim to match their trades to TCGPlayer’s reported market value as possible. Others thou༺ght this was bad form, and considered it inappropriate to ask for cash in a trade. One person told me they sh🎶ould sell the card to the store if they want money, but if they want to trade it should always be cards for cards. One thing everyone agreed on was that this kind of thing didn’t really exist before TCGPlayer.
I see the value in having instant access to the current market value of cards. It’s a great tool for researching things quickly t💛o ensure that new and uninformed players don’t get taken advantage of in a trade. But at the same time, it has reduced the entire concept of value down to a monetary one, and it has a lot of people convinced that that’s the only way to assess the value of a card or the fairness of a trade.
If I have eight Tinker Bell, Giant Fairies, and I need a Donald Duck, Strutting His Stuff to complete my deck, then there’s value for me to make a financially unfavorable trade with someone. It could be argued that I could simply sell the Tinker Bell and buy the Donald Duck, pocketing the extra cash, but that mentality fails to consider the value on convenience I’d get from trading with someone in person at my store rather than selling a card ꧙online and dealing with the hassle of shipping, as well as the value of instant gratification from having the card right now.
For me, the highest value of all is the mutual gain from conducting trades with other people. I want that social experience, and I like the feeling of two people walking away satisfied with a trade. I’m willing to trade a more valuable card for a less valuable one if it satisfies me in other ways. But it seems like a lot of people, thanks to a combinat𝔍ion of resources like TCGPlayer and Cardmarket and the rising trend of TCG ‘finance’ influencers, are only concerned with the dollar value, and aren’t willing to consider what other types of values exist.
There’s nothing wrong withꦚ buying and selling cards, and if you prefer that to trading I wouldn’t judge you. But there’s a purity in trading that feels like it’s been corrupted by an obsession with market value. Drilling down to the exact dollar value of every card makes tradജing tedious, and it runs contrary to the spirit of trading cards. You don’t have to let a graph on an online marketplace tell you how valuable a card should be to you. I believe we can still trade with our hearts, just like we used to with Pokemon cards on the playground.