Goat Format is a Buy

A little known fact about me is that I came very close to working as an analyst at an investment bank. While I’m no multi-billion dollar hedge-fund manager, I have a lot of “common sense knowledge” that eludes many retail investors, and certainly most Yu-Gi-Oh! players. A lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! players worry about whether the cards that they purchase will depreciate in value in the near future. This is for good reason; most of them do. Let’s start this article off with the obligatory, “Trading cards aren’t a good investment, but…” If you were looking to put your money into some speculative pieces of cardboard with a long-term investment horizon, Goat Format cards are clearly superior to virtually all other options available. I will outline why this is the case.

Why TCGs Are Usually a Bad Investment

Despite what certain Yugitube personalities might tell you, TCGs are about the worst vehicle that you could possibly park your money into. Yes, worse than oil, precious metals, cryptocurrency, and even worse than shares of Tesla. Watching Yu-Gi-Oh! prices fluctuate wildly can be fun, much in the way that reading horoscopes can be fun. This doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to take them seriously. ​Generally speaking, makers of TCGs do not have incentive to keep card prices high. In fact, the opposite is probably true. In the era of digital TCGs that take advantage of lower production costs to offer a free-to-play + microtransactions experience, no one wants to tell their potential customers that their cards are rising in price every year. No one starts playing a game because it’s an investment; they do it to have fun. People want entertainment at a reasonable price, and Konami’s target demographic does not have a lot of money to spend on their hobbies. The price of any asset is controlled by supply and demand, and Konami has perfect control over supply of any card and a strong influence over demand. They can reprint or ban any card at will. They can nerf the deck that the card goes into. They can power-creep the card out of playability. They often do all of the above. Investing in any particular card for the long-term more or less requires you to be some sort of psychic that knows which particular card is going to be the weird exception to the rule that, “Every money card eventually gets reprinted, nerfed, or power-crept back down to Earth.” This is not to say that markets are always perfectly rational and short-term gains cannot be found. When Pot of Desires was first printed as a secret rare in The Dark Illusion, it was clearly undervalued to anyone who had a decent sense of card evaluation. It debuted at a price tag of about $40, and I told The Game Academy that it would be in their best interest to stockpile them at that price. By a few months later it had roughly doubled in value. The problem though was that Pot of Desires became a victim of its own success. Konami reprinted it multiple times to further cash in on its popularity, and now the secret rare version is worth just $20. Anyone who invested in the card for the long-term got crushed.