But there’s a second kind of outclassed that has nothing to do with skill, and I didn’t run into it until about a decade later. Last year I got obsessed with the Pokemon TCG for the first time in my life, and then just as quickly, I dropped it, because of how difficult it was just to find packs of the latest expansion. At the time I was living in a nice apartment in Philadelphia working full-time, and even I had to accept Pokemon cards were a price point I couldn’t justify to my bank account. Every card shop I visited told me some version of the same thing: their supply was scarce, and getting scarcer. One associate told me the store was buying its own inventory from scalpers just to have anything on the shelves at all, and when I asked if I could take one of the empty display boxes home for my junk journal, he said no, they needed those too, because the packs they bought off scalpers didn’t come in the display boxes. They were reusing them just to have somewhere to put the loose packs.

This year, things looked different. I’m in Arizona now, with my pregnant partner, and when her best friend got back from a sixteen-month deployment in Alaska, where apparently there isn’t much to do besides play Magic: The Gathering, she was stoked to teach us both how to play. I’d never played Magic before, but I wasn’t surprised to find myself hooked immediately. What did surprise me, however, was how easy it was to actually find cards to buy in stores. Booster packs, the latest sets, even the Universes Beyond crossovers with Lord of the Rings and Marvel and Avatar, all of it just sitting on shelves, in stock, wherever I looked. My best guess is that Pokemon’s scarcity problem comes down to nostalgia and brand equity in a way Magic’s doesn’t; Magic never had an anime and a toy aisle turning it into a cultural juggernaut the way Pokemon did, so it never became quite as lucrative a target.

So a few days ago, when I took my teenage brothers-in-law to their first trading card show, I was genuinely excited to see what kind of Magic cards would be on offer. Instead, booth after booth was Pokemon. What started out funny turned into something closer to disappointment by the end, because every table had identical inventory, all priced suspiciously close to MSRP, including the exact expansion I’d spent months failing to find in Philadelphia. I’d always wondered where all that inventory had gone and now I knew. All over the country they had been hoarded away in boxes, hauled from show to show. It’s sad to think of how many kids and passionate fans of the game, not scalpers looking to make a profit, that would love to actually use these cards in gameplay, and how routinely those kids and fans get boxed out of the market by people who only see monetary value in the hobby.