What’s a weird addendum to this is that the Professor in the video I linked down-thread was saying that they can’t even keep up with print demand for their own core products! They’re diluting their brand and flooding the market even when their base game would keep them profitable indefinitely.

I wonder if it would be possible to do a CCG and have it be successful while being print-your-own. Maybe have it be a collaborative project where people submit art and cards to be considered for the next set, which releases every one or two months. The central group (and contributors) could even still make money by selling the cards - just instead of banking on artificial scarcity for profit they’d be running a print shop.

I think fans of Netrunner did this after the company stopped making sets

Every capitalist card game will eventually go this route if they don’t go under first.

Yeah, but so far to my knowledge of the big 3 (pokemon tcg, yugioh, and mtg), magic is the only ones going this hard into it.

Like yeah Yugioh would have the occasional cross promotion card, but it’s typically just a normal vanilla monster (aka, completely useless), and it’s also maybe just 1-3 cards at best that come with a monthly magazine sub. And even then all their stuff is largely references and homages, like there’s an archetype in YGO that’s a reference to both Wizard of Oz and OT Star Wars (Kozmo).

Pokemon tcg, also as far as my knowledge goes hasn’t done anything in terms of crossovers either.

If we get into long running smaller card games, there’s Redemption, which due to the theming of the whole card game (bible, yes, it’s a real tcg depicting stuff from the bible) makes it very naturally anti-crossover.