The price of the digimon trading card game (2020)

 Hello.

 

So, I've been playing the digimon card game for basically the entire time it's existed, and in that time something people always have been saying is that the game is inexpensive. The thing is, I don't think I've ever really agreed, not in principal anyway. There's nothing about the game's design or distribution that leads to it being inexpensive, high rarity cards are pretty difficult to obtain and there isn't a good reprint policy and high rarity cards aren't designed to be more niche or less powerful than lower rarity ones, so deck price is largely arbitrary and just based on availability of the cards. Sometimes a deck is mainly commons, uncommons, and rares and so it's relatively cheap, but other times decks need full playsets of a secret rare, and while I don't think any deck has wanted a playset of multiple secret rares there's no reason to think that bandai wont eventually print a deck like that. For that reason, as well as others, I've always felt like you need an astrix when you say the game is cheap, but earlier today I saw someone say that the "Best deck" is under 100 dollars and uhhhhhhhh I decided to check.

I can't know what they thought was the best deck, so I looked at 3 lists that won recent events. There was a regional in france where the winning deck was 7 deadly sins. I went though and checked the price of that: It's about 250 USD (with shipping which is about 10 dollars). But that's a smaller tournament than the regional in america that was won by imperialdramon, that deck is ~175 (again in USD and with shipping). AncientGaru hasn't technically won anything yet I don't think, but it's a good deck as well and it technically tied the imperialdramon list in w/l record, it just had worse tie breakers I guess. That deck is ~125 (again, USD and with shipping). I don't think there's another deck that's arguably "the best", and these prices seem very normal to me. There are some spikes, but there's always going to be something spiking. What I would say is that the price range for (competitive) digimon decks is usually between 100-300 dollars. There are sometimes decks below that and sometimes decks above that, but in both cases they are kinda anomalies.

The actual question I think is if that is expensive. "Expensive" is very subjective. Often I hear people compare the game to yugioh, where a playset of fiendsmith engraver would run you about 260 atm. But yugioh is a very extreme example. Right now if you want a competitive MTG standard deck your budget would need to be between 100-500 and the 400+ decks are only really that expensive because of a few abnormally expensive cards, meaning while that's the range it's more like 100-350 or 400-500, there aren't really many decks in the 350+. This is almost the same as digimon if you account for the fact that magic decks are 20 cards larger than digimon decks. That is, of course, only for standard. Pioneer is in a similar range, modern is a good deal more expensive, and pauper decks are pretty much all under 100 dollars. So you can choose to cherry pick this in all directions. I'm not going to bother looking up pokemon prices, I don't really know where I'd look anyway since I have no interest in pokemon at all, but everyone always says it's like 50 bucks for a deck idk.

BUT, that's all comparing digimon to other card games. In my opinion card games are as a whole really expensive. If you compare to another competitive game like a fighting game, the cost difference is huge. Tekken 8 is ~100 dollars for the full game + dlc, which is expensive by fighting game standards. And that's the price for *all* characters, if you just wanted to play yoshi you do not need to buy anything else. Actually, you technically don't need to buy Tekken at all, since the standard at tournaments for fighting games is that the TO provides the game, so if you can practice on a borrowed copy or you only play at locals, you actually do not need to spend any money on the game itself. That's obviously kind of unrealistic tho. The budget for a fighting  game is something like between 30 and 100 dollars. You probably want to also include the price of a stick but the haute 42 is like 50 bucks and that's maybe more than you'd spend on a mat + sleeves + deckbox, but not that much more.

Anyway, my point is that card games are expensive. I don't think digimon is so expensive that most people can't afford it, but like, it's more expensive than it should be, and it's expensive to a degree that I think a reasonable person would look at it and go "oh, I don't have the money to play that". It's cheaper some competitors in the same space, but it's def not the cheapest or even really close to the cheapest competitive game you can get into. Chess is basically free.