The Card Game Chart Is Pokémon and Empty Boxes

Draupnir was Odin’s ring, and every ninth night it dripped eight more rings of equal weight. It made him no richer in any way that mattered — the gold simply arrived, endlessly, whether or not there was anything to spend it on. It is the oldest description we have of a product that produces more product.

Ten Pokémon, seven boxes, and a Magic set one week old

Amazon’s Collectible Card Games chart, ranked by units sold. The top twenty, sorted:

• Ten Pokémon products — booster bundles, blisters, elite trainer boxes and assorted card lots
• Seven storage products — cardboard bulk boxes, plastic deck boxes and top loader cases
• Two Magic: The Gathering sealed products — a Commander deck and a bundle, both from one just-released set
• One set of polyhedral dice, which is not a card game at all

And within the seven storage products, four are explicitly Magic: The Gathering Commander deck boxes. That is the steady state of this chart: the largest-revenue trading card game in the world appears on it as empty boxes, while its actual cards sell somewhere else entirely.

The two Magic sealed products at six and eleven are the exception that proves it. Both are from a single set released days ago, and neither has collected one rating yet — which is what a launch week looks like on a units-sold chart, not a game that lives here. Give it a fortnight. Meanwhile not a single Yu-Gi-Oh, Lorcana, Flesh and Blood or One Piece item ranks at all.

Why the chart looks like this

Two mechanisms, both worth understanding before you trust any ranking in this category.

Pokémon sells through this channel and Magic largely does not. Magic’s sealed product moves through local game stores, distributors and specialist online retailers, where the pricing and allocation are better. Pokémon sealed product is a mass-market gift item, sold in supermarkets and online at scale, bought by people who are not in a game store on a Friday night.

Accessories are bought online by everyone. Whatever game you play, the deck box and the sleeves come from wherever is cheapest. So the accessory half of this chart reflects the whole hobby, while the card half reflects only the part of the hobby that shops here.

The result is a chart that is a genuinely good guide to card supplies and a genuinely misleading guide to card games.

What to actually take from it

If you are buying for someone who plays: buy the boxes and sleeves here, and buy the cards somewhere else. The accessory rankings are real signal — those small manufacturers at 4.8 and 4.9 stars are being rated by people who use them weekly, and the ratings are unusually high because a deck box either works or is immediately obvious.

If you are buying for someone who collects Pokémon, the chart is straightforwardly useful, with one caveat covered below.

And if you are buying for a Magic player, this chart will tell you nothing about cards and quite a lot about how they store them, which is a more useful gift than a booster pack anyway. A Commander player with an unsleeved deck is a solvable problem; a Commander player who needs one specific card is not.

Where these picks came from, honestly

Ranks, ratings and review counts read straight off Amazon’s collectible card game chart this morning, best-sellers first, checked against every product already used across this site. Chart node 166242011.

These are research picks with a lived thumb on the scale. Tony ran a card and board game shop for about four years, and the reasoning above about where sealed product actually moves comes from that rather than from the chart. The specific boxes are chart reads.

The one honest warning

The assorted card lots at three, four and ten are not what a Pokémon player wants, and they sell enormously.

“25 rare cards with 100 HP or higher.” “50 cards from every series.” “50 cards plus a rare legendary.” These rank on 22,112 and 78,521 ratings respectively — genuinely huge numbers — and they are repackaged bulk. The cards are real. They are also, almost by definition, the cards nobody wanted, sorted by a rule that sounds like value and is not one.

For a young child who wants a pile of Pokémon cards to look at, they are fine and they are cheap. For anyone who plays the game, a single current booster bundle is worth more than a hundred assorted cards, and the person receiving it will know the difference immediately.