Take out of this what you will but just for my own amusement I went onto the 'bay when it had 1,860,000 listings under the category of Trading Cards.
Then I searched various categories to try and work out what the dominant listings were, Here's what I found:
Yugioh - 171,000
Pokemon - 169,097
MTG - 126,678
Which gives just under 40% of all listings are covered by these three categories.

Just in passing Topps comes in at 75,217 of all listings and Marvel at a miserly 45,924.

I must say that I was quite surprised at these findings, how about you?

Interesting, but not surprising to me.

YuGiOh and Pokemon are still strong sellers, Magic is evergreen too.

What might be more interesting is to look to see if these percentages follow through to SOLD auctions. I'm betting there are quite a few game card auctions that don't end in a sale.

Ed

Magic: The Gathering still has robust sales. I was invited to participate in a Magic: Prerelease tournament last week and I was surprised that 44 people were there to play. Over 100 boxes of the new release were already pre-sold according to the store owner.

For the full view of popularity of Magic and the other collectible card games, you'd have to also include the listings and sales from the other main category the Magic and the like are listed in on Ebay, which is "Trading card Games", with 400k recent sales and 600k active listings.
There are also a slew of websites dedicated to the buying and selling of ccg's.

With that in mind, your point is underscored as those kinds of gaming cards of are vastly more popular than our kind of trading cards, and they sell multiples of what non-sport trading cards sell.

They are also, for the most part dreadfully un-rare (is that a word???)
Here are some statistics:
For the BB Premiere Edition, there are 30,000 boxes of starter decks and 45,000 boxes of expansion packs. For just the original BB run. The white border was *unlimited* and goodness know how much they printed.
Alternate Universe- There were 42,335 of the ultra-rare card printed. Print run for Alternate Universe is 142,294 boxes. The UR card went for piles of money at first..cause it was ultra-rare after all. Until we began to realize how not rare everything was.
There are exceptions. There's a rare promo card that is nearly impossible to find. But, CCG cards...man, whatta sour taste I have for those. But, in their defense, they weren't specifically making it a collectible, they were making a game.

The international appeal of them is what makes for the massive sales, there's no language barrier on them, really.
And even with those substantial runs of the original MTG stuff, it's still not enough out there for the market that exists for it. Prices are insane on early issues. Even newer edition singles, packs, and boxes from MTG can sell for big green, not to mention the SDcc promo sets from the past two years.

I have some of ccg cards in my collection, mostly Star Wars, Star Trek Original series, x-Files, Nightmare Before Christmas, a little Marvel Overpower, etc. but I've never played any of the games. I got them as movie/tv/comic sets, just like any other I'd collect. They were all very well made, regular card-sized and numbered (or else with available checklists), of subjects I enjoyed, and sold at stores where I bought regular cards back then, so I picked them up. They might've helped a few of the now mostly gone card card and comic stores stay in business a little longer, I think that's true.

Only the Alpha and Beta Magic cards are truly rare and they are around 21 - 22 years old now. That was before the game really got started. Even the first edition cards were overprinted, but they were absorbed by the demand. Once the revised edition came out the print run was too large to be called collectible, but that didn't seem to bother collectors. Every edition after that was massive, but if you were playing Magic you needed the cards for the various deck constructions anyway.

CCG, as in Collectable Card Game, is a misnomer. The market exists because kids and young adults still play the popular games, but the true production numbers should send any card collector running. They are as bad as Beanie Babies, but at least the craze for those stuff animals only lasted a few years before it all fell apart.

Interestingly enough, for at least Trek and Decipher, CCG means Customizable Card Game, not Collectible Card Game. Which, for the record, I have to remind myself of when I start on my CCG rants..Cause I wanna say it says collectible, but it LIES

I have never heard of the term Customizable Card Game, but I guess they don't want to be accused of false advertising. If you were to look up CCG it always refers to Collectible Card Game, even though as you said, it lies.

What I liked about the Star Wars set from Decipher was that it was announced the information for the character, locations, etc, on the cards was considered "canon", which is to say "official" and there was plenty of new tidbits of info to be found on them.

Of course, with the sale of Star Wars to Disney all of that along with the rest of the "Expanded Universe" has been conveniently swept away (just like the Old Republic", haha).

While none of the early Decipher cards from 1996 or so were even close to rare, even the black border limited premiere edition, their final releases from just before the license for SW gaming cards went to Wizards of the Coast (around 2001), were printed in lesser amounts and are now somewhat hard to find, as often happens with a line that is discontinued, but due to the subject matter (and the fact that the game is still played) is still collected some 15 years later.
This phenomenon is also seen on the last few issues of long-running comic series that are cancelled. Those issues tend to be printed in smaller runs (since most series end due to poor sales), so down the line when people go back to collect an old set, they find the final issues are usually the hardest to get, generally tougher to find than the early "collectible" first issues, which, of course, tended to have a much higher print run.

The only one of these I collected was the Aliens Vs Predator but that was just to get all the photo's from the films, I never actually played the game, I did get a full set of those though.

Same for me. Only collected Babylon 5 ccg for the pictures of characters and events from the shows amazing 5 year run. Never played the game. Plus if you were lucky enough precedence inserted embossed autos to be found in booster boxes that varied by series. I believe Mira furlans auto from the premier set did not have the embossed logo on the card. I collected the Premier, Shadows, Great War, Deluxe, and Severed Dreams sets only. The ones produced after (Psi Corps, Wheel of Fire and Crusade) seem now to be the most expensive on auction sites probably due to smaller print runs as interest in the game faded over time.

There was always something about those cards..like getting a Picard card was like getting Picard himself

Back in 1995, I bought packs of the James Bond CCG released in the U.S. that has photos of all of the Bond films from "Dr.No" through "Goldeneye" on it. Never played the game, but I collected it because I am a 007 fan

I must have spent $ 800 or so opening packs, to get a complete set of all 210-220 or so cards

I remember that I was down to missing one last card, from "Diamonds Are Forever", which I pulled from the final pack !

I also recall an error on this set, that there is no "Blown Away" card as listed on the checklist, but there are 2 versions of the "Ousted" cards. Obviously one was meant to be "Blown Away"

This is the set I am talking about

http://www.nslists.com/jbgolccg.htm

The "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" ccg was also a fun one for fans of that movie and comedy troupe as there were cards within it, that in typical Python fashion, poked fun at the game itself. I remember one card, a Knight card, that had a blank space intended for the player to put a picture of their own face in.

So that should leave about 1,272,084 sports related promo cards

Sounds a bit high for Sports Promo's, I didn't realize there were that many out there.

quote:

Originally posted by Larry C.:
So that should leave about 1,272,084 sports related promo cards

Sorry did I miss something here? Where did sports (let alone promos) come into the discussion?

Mebbe it's a note of how many non related cards end up in each category. I find the weirdest things showing up in my trek card category.