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Exploring the Rise of Trading Card Games in the Philippines
Last weekend, collectors, gamers, and pop culture fanatics gathered at SPACE at One Ayala in Makati City to attend Geek+Pop’s Pinoy Creatives/third Cards and Collectibles show. It featured the usual video game and trading-card vendors, but it also showcased Pinoy artists, cosplayers, and the one-time return of MNL48—I mean, G-Pop girls.
I will get this out of the way right now before we delve into the main topic: this Pinoy Creatives event truly tried to showcase the creativity and talent of Filipino artists.
From traditional illustrations and digital art to musical performances and cosplay, one can truly say that Cadre 28 really wanted to show appreciation to those who gave a Filipino spin to whatever aspect of the arts they chose to delve into.
That doesn’t mean that the event went smoothly. Some segments, especially the Filipino creatives panel from day 1, could’ve been given some more time, as, for whatever reason, it got cut short. Even the hosts had to apologize to the panelists for how rushed they were to get to the other segments as soon as possible.
Another thing I noticed, and it is a major part of why I chose to write about this, is that most of the vendors at the event, if not all, were selling nothing but trading cards. Some sell other brands of TCGs like Magic: The Gathering or One Piece, but most of them sell Pokémon trading cards.
Which now begs the question: “Have trading card games become mainstream in the Philippines?”
To answer that question, I asked some of the people who sell trading cards at the Geek+Pop event. Note: this isn’t a comprehensive look at the TCG market, but a quick snapshot of where the Philippine TCG community stands and whether it is actually gaining mainstream attention as we’re told.
How I did this was by asking some vendors questions. The first question was, of course, whether TCG is becoming mainstream in the Philippines. Second, since scalping has also been a problem in this space, I asked them how they deal with that. Lastly, I asked what advice they would give for people new to the scene.
Most of the vendors I’ve asked these questions answered “yes” to the first question, and I can see why.
If you open Facebook or Instagram and follow the same algorithms as I do, you’ll see people either flexing their latest Pokémon card hauls or MTG, Yu-Gi-Oh, whatever.
As a matter of fact, a video from Gamebookr last year listed the top 10 TCG brands in the Philippines.
Out of the 10 brands listed, Pokémon TCG is number one on the list.
Although Pokémon TCG has the most basic core gameplay mechanic compared to other card games, most of its collectors are not playing the game. The reason Pokémon was number 1 is because of branding. Most Filipino children remember the video games and the anime series.
The mere fact that national news outlets are now reporting on The Pokémon Company releasing its limited-edition 30th anniversary TCG box set and events like Geek+Pop hosting vendors of said card games proves the point that trading card games have now penetrated the “normie” space through the Internet, especially social media.
Secondly, with trading card games becoming popular like sneakers before it, there will always be scalpers and other nefarious elements. Most of the vendors answered my question about how they prevent such things from happening by limiting the orders or making sure they sign up for accounts on their respective websites and such.
One vendor’s answer piqued my interest: “When it comes to (buying from) scalpers, you don’t have to support it.” If you look at it, whether you’re a vendor or a customer, you really do have the option not to buy from or sell to these people.
There will always be other avenues to get your TCG fix. Unless, and I cannot stress this enough, the card is a real 1 out of 1 super rare card, and the only person who has it is a scalper, then that would be the only time you might have to support them. Then again, do you reeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaalllllllly need that card in your life?
Thirdly, I asked them what their advice would be to those who wanted to start their journey into TCG. Their answers range from “start small and cheap” to “enjoy what you love.” The second reason is pretty self-explanatory, but the first one is coming from a speculator’s point of view.
If you follow the history of comic books, there was a point in the mid 1980s to the early 1990s where comics became a popular and profitable commodity amongst collectors. With titles like “Watchmen”, “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, “Secret Wars” and others generating millions of dollars for both Marvel and DC, they started publishing limited edition versions of select titles. This also meant that the collector’s market were buying these books in droves, with the end result of selling them for profit in the distant future.
The TCG industry has not yet reached that level of speculation yet, especially in the Philippines, but that’s what they want to achieve. The card makers wanted to earn as much dollars and cents in 2026 like how comic books generated cash for everyone back in 1993 or more.
In conclusion, we can safely say that, yes, the TCG hobby is becoming mainstream thanks to a number of factors. The longevity of this time in the spotlight, however, remains to be seen as trading cards are no doubt expensive items. Will this be just another fad like fidget spinners, or will this be a permanent fixture of Pinoy geekdom? In order to answer that question, everyone might have to speculate as to what happens with the prices, community, and even the games themselves.
#cardGames #collecting #games #gaming #pokemon -
If you think your hobby is ruined because someone else does it better with less effort, or someone else does it worse with less effort, is it really a hobby?
Or is it because of the status linked to the effort and outcome?
I’m genuinely puzzled by the virulence around all this stuff. I love drawing and painting, I love making music, I love programming. I poured thousands if not tens of thousands of hours into each of those. In none of those cases do I feel resentment or anger or sadness because either a machine does it better (programming), or millions of people produce some usually garish stuff I can easily ignore (maybe I’m just too offline / my communities are too curated, but I rarely see ai art if not looking for it).
In fact, while I’m quite angry at the companies behind the models, someone pooping out an image with midjourney and being proud of it, that’s awesome. I was proud of my drawings/music/code when they were ass, and I’m sure I got on peoples nerves showing it off.
Maybe they say they “drew” it, then that’s a starting point showing why I like drawing (as in, the act itself) and they might like it too, or just engage them about the images they like and what inspirations they have and then point out (with “critique tact”) why it looks … not great, or just showing images I do think are awesome. Art is quite universal, there’s a good chance common ground here is very close.
Like, generative machines that “are better” than humans is nothing new in music circles. You had “poop music machines” since forever (player piano anyone?). I started with rebirth and ableton and was making some proper poop. And then I got better, because I had people who took me along. If all I encountered was people telling me to fuck off that’s not real music you have to learn how to play guitar, then yeah I wouldn’t have stuck with it for decades.
I totally get not wanting to listen to shitty sample mashups as a guitarist. But then I would just… not listen to it? Not get upset over it, there’s guitar to be played.
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Well this was an awesome book, highly recommend, about differences in philosophy around authenticity and copies in art (and products, in the last chapter) between Europe and China.
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RE: https://mastodon.boston/@MSPCAAngell/117485786390076909
Mspca angell is where we got all our animals! They’re on mastodon!
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I’m gonna play my favourite game of getting yelled at for saying something that will become true in 6 months to a year (since things are accelerating): operating systems as we know them are dead (as they should), most devices will have about 800 different firmwares, and any kind of discussion around what to do with the kernel or what to contribute to in terms of software (regardless of licensing or opensource or proprietary) will turn into “where can I find reasonably well documented source material that has been validated well enough (by humans or otherwise)”. The value of the Linux kernel will be more about the massive amount of decently shown to work drivers than it being a coherent (I’ll leave you to your own opinion on this one) operating system.
One of the reasons we have such massive software complexity problems is that it used to be less costly to add some layer on top of something existing, wether it was good or not, than to sit down, think, and then do the extremely onerous work of rewriting / rearchitecting while shipping something coherent. I’ll just point at termcap and tty handling, or bash whitespace interpolation as an example of the insanity. How many millennia of human (and now gpu) time have been wasted on that nonsense?
Nothing is becoming clearer to me as I replace complex stack after complex stack with a bunch of JavaScript and a few compiler passes.
I’ll leave you with a few examples, using the wasm version of the artcraft libraries. This took me 3% weekly on my Claude and I can now prompt basically any Photoshop/indesign/lightroom/illustrator/excel-y thing I want.
You might think that code disappearing is sad, but you know what’s really hard? Figuring out formal languages to say, “build professional photoshop UI experiences that run on a Nintendo DS style device”, or “what’s a good formal language to build networking stacks”. These are unsolved problems because there’s at most what, like 100 networking stack implementations of reasonable quality out there? We don’t know how to build networking stacks. No person has ever built 50 by themselves to really understand the problem.
We are like the blind trying to scope out an elephant when it comes to software.
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Soon Linux will just be a repository of reasonably validated datasheets 😭😂
