I got outclassed at a card game long before I understood what real competition looks like. Years later, a trading card show taught me the harder lesson: some kinds of losing have nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with who hustled faster.
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An inside look into my brain on art and design, plus the occasional detour into comics, woodworking, and whatever else is on my mind.
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I got outclassed at a card game long before I understood what real competition looks like. Years later, a trading card show taught me the harder lesson: some kinds of losing have nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with who hustled faster.
At a recent Pokémon convention, my family found almost every booth staffed by resellers instead of collectors — and the closest thing to craft on the floor was a table of bath bombs. This piece argues that scalpers aren't the villains of the trading card economy; hustle culture is, and it's been training all of us to mistake extraction for entrepreneurship.
