The Professor

The Four Pillars of Card Value Every Investor and Collector Needs to Know

Ask ten different people in this hobby why a card is valuable and you will get ten different answers. Some will point to the pull rate. Others will talk about tournament results. Some will mention how the card looks, how much it reminds them of childhood, or how the character on it is their all-time […]

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Is One Piece TCG Really the Next Big Thing for Investors Or Is It Just a Phase

Is One Piece TCG Really the Next Big Thing for Investors Or Is It Just a Phase?

A booster box that retailed for approximately $100 USD when it launched in December 2022 now trades between $2,700 and $4,344 USD. Let that number land for a second, that’s a big price jump. That is the story of One Piece TCG’s OP-01 Romance Dawn, the birth set of the game, and it is the

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The Sunk Cost Trap Why Collectors Hold Too Long and How to Avoid It

The Sunk Cost Trap: Why Collectors Hold Too Long and How to Avoid It

You bought a card for $200. It was a solid pickup at the time (well done homie), good fundamentals, trending upward, the kind of card you felt good about. Then the market shifted… oh no. A reprint was announced, the hype faded, or a newer chase card pulled all the attention away. Now it is

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Magic The Gathering vs The NASDAQ How Did Cardboard Stack Up in the First Half of 2026

Magic: The Gathering vs The NASDAQ: How Did Cardboard Stack Up in the First Half of 2026?

The fourth and final instalment of our H1 2026, Cards vs Capital series, and appropriately the most layered. Magic: The Gathering is the oldest major TCG in the hobby, we are talking a game that has been running since 1993, (yes, before Pokémon Younglings), and its investment market reflects that complexity. Unlike Pokémon’s broadly shared

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One Piece TCG vs The NASDAQ How Did Cardboard Stack Up in the First Half of 2026

One Piece TCG vs The NASDAQ: How Did Cardboard Stack Up in the First Half of 2026?

We are going to get straight to the number that matters in this one, because it deserves to lead. The NASDAQ 100 returned +17.92% in H1 2026 (the first half of the year, January through June). The Card Ladder index for One Piece TCG returned +119% in the same six months. Yes, you read that

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Yu-Gi-Oh TCG vs The NASDAQ How Did Cardboard Stack Up in the First Half of 2026

Yu-Gi-Oh TCG vs The NASDAQ: How Did Cardboard Stack Up in the First Half of 2026?

Welcome to the second instalment in our H1 2026 (the first half of the year for the new peeps) TCG franchisee vs the NASDAQ 100 series, this one’s for the Yu-Gi-Oh gang, where we put each major TCG head-to-head against the NASDAQ 100 for the first six months of the year. This one is the

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Pokémon TCG vs The NASDAQ How Did Cardboard Stack Up in the First Half of 2026 (1)

Pokémon TCG vs The NASDAQ: How Did Cardboard Stack Up in the First Half of 2026?

Every six months here at The TCG Times, we are going to do something that most card publications do not bother with: put our hobby’s investment performance directly next to the traditional financial benchmark that most of our readers money is sitting in when it is not buying cardboard, as we have said before, we

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Pokémon 151 vs Celebrations Which Anniversary-Style Set Actually Held Its Value Better

Pokémon 151 vs Celebrations: Which Anniversary-Style Set Actually Held Its Value Better

Two sets, two very different launches, two very different relationships but both have a sh*t ton of nostalgia. Like we have said before, nostalgia in TCG usual mean money. Celebrations arrived in October 2021 as Pokémon’s official 25th anniversary released a limited, special-distribution set built specifically to mark the occasion. On paper, Celebrations should have

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Why We Think Mega Evolution – Delta Reign Will Be Worth Investing In

Why We Think Mega Evolution – Delta Reign Will Be Worth Investing In

A Rayquaza VMAX alternate art from 2021 is sitting at $1000+ today, and the price is climbing higher than the sky pillar, comfortably the second most valuable card in its entire set, despite sharing identical pull rates with three other Eeveelution chase cards currently trading at a third of that price. That is not a

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