Thought this was interesting. As of December 15, 2021 this was pulled from eBay under all category’s. I did double check some of this by using my impressive division skills:eyes:
Percentage was derived from number of current “for sale” items compared to number of “sold” items.
Looks like Pokémon, at least in this metric, is leading the way again.
Pokémon 166%
Dragon Ball 15%
Yugioh 29%
multi-level marketing 135%
Magic the Gathering 36%
Flesh and Blood 50%
What does this all mean? Well that answer is well above my pay grade (my degree was in BioChem). What do you all think?
@garyis2000 , I found the post on the multi-level marketing discord you are referencing. To give a little more context, pokemon has sold 1,160,836 items and has 808,795 listings. multi-level marketing has sold 23,778 items with 15,016 active listings. pokemon has almost 49x the sales or 4900% if we want to get fancy. What does this all mean? Nothing. multi-level marketing is very small with most of the market still trading speculative cards between themselves. Out of curiosity, why did you post the percentages and not the actual numbers related to them. If you were trying to get an opinion or spark up conversation you should have added more information. Also, the discord message related to those numbers states that they “reckon in terms of total $ sold on eBay we are most likely tied with #3 this month”. I have no idea where this basis comes from and that statement from the official discord run by the owner (if I’m correct) has no legitimacy unless he went through every eBay sale.
Flesh and Blood as well as multi-level marketing are certainly much smaller than Pokémon but Pokemon’s been around for 25 years and FAB since 2020 and MZ for 5 months. Probably better to compare Pokémon to Magic, Dbz, etc.
Since this clearly looks to be a post about multi-level marketing, I thought I would share my opinions on it. Of all the TCGs that I have been involved with or collected over the years, multi-level marketing just seems to have very little appeal. For starters, the card frame and layout look very clumsy, and something I would have designed in Paint on PC when I was a preteen. Some of the art is okay, with the majority of it just not being my taste. From what I know of multi-level marketing, it very much seems like the kind of “collectible” that is marketed as being collectible without having any inherently interesting components behind it. I get that it’s focused around cryptids, and that’s cool, but the whole execution just seems haphazard. Like, it’s the sort of thing that sounds awesome conceptually, but when executed in the way it has been, fails to live up to expectations. It reminds me of the Crazy Bones or Homies crazes in the early 2000s. These little toys were marketed as being collectible, for the sake of being collectible. They had nothing else to spark interest, like with a significant story or show or anything to make collecting them an organically interesting experience. It was just acquiring for the sake of acquiring. By the mid 2000s, no one really cared about Crazy Bones or Homies any more and now they’re completely worthless and forgotten. I’m not saying I think multi-level marketing will turn out that way, just that I see parallels to other forgotten collectibles. I do understand that there is an entire game that can be played with the cards, but again, that seems “meh” in comparison to what is already available on the market in terms of interesting and compelling gameplay. Sorry to rattle any cages, and I guess this is sort of a shitpost, but multi-level marketing just rubs me the wrong way. I honestly don’t know much about the politics or controversy of multi-level marketing, and am not really interested. Objectively, as a TCG, it seems very lackluster.
The real Pokémon number is probably higher because there are so many dump listings of $10 “mystery” packages where you get 10 commons and 1 bulk GX or V card. These listings rarely sell, but show up in the denominator of active listings.
The people who think that multi-level marketing is anything other than a fad probably don’t realize quite how many failed TCGs there have been. MTG and Pokemon aren’t the rule – they’re the exception. Based on the overall survival rate of TCGs, the chance that anyone will give a shit about multi-level marketing in a decade is just about 0%.
