The Professor - The TCG Times

The Best Yu-Gi-Oh Characters to Collect in 2026: Our Investment Case

Leave a Comment / Yu-Gi-Oh Market / The Professor

Yu-Gi-Oh investing is complicated, more so than Pokémon or Magic in some ways. But why? Because the market is so heavily split between competitive and collector demand that the same character can perform completely differently depending on which type of card you hold. A competitive staple gets reprinted. A prestige collector’s piece does not. Understanding

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The BGS Grading Scale Explained: What Every Sub-Grade Actually Means for Your Card’s Value

Leave a Comment / Slabs & Stacks / The Professor

Pick up any BGS slab and you will see four numbers staring back at you alongside the overall grade. Most collectors glance at the big number in the middle and move on. The investors who actually understand what they are looking at examine all five. Why? Because those four sub-grades tell a story that the

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Position Sizing in TCG Investing: How Much of Your Portfolio Should One Card Ever Be?

Leave a Comment / TCG Finance & Investment, TCG Investing 101 / The Professor

Somewhere out there right now, someone has 80% of their TCG portfolio in a single card. They bought it during a hype cycle, it felt like a sure thing, and the idea of splitting that capital across several “lesser” opportunities felt like thinning out a winning bet. We are not judging, we have seen versions

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How We Would Build a TCG Portfolio From Scratch With $1,000 in 2026

Leave a Comment / TCG Finance & Investment, TCG Investing 101 / The Professor

We are sure most people with a decent portfolio have been asked some version of this question more than almost any other: “I want to start investing in TCG cards, how do I actually make money?” It is a board question, and we think the most useful answer we can give is not a theoretical

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Why the Commander Format Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to MTG Investors

Leave a Comment / MTG Market / The Professor

There is a format in Magic: The Gathering that Wizards of the Coast did not design, did not plan for, and for years barely acknowledged existed. A format invented by players, spread through community word of mouth, and eventually adopted so widely that it became the most-played format in the entire game. A format that,

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The One Piece Cards That Will Be Worth a Fortune, They Just Haven’t Been Printed Yet

Leave a Comment / One Piece Market / The Professor

Most One Piece TCG investment content focuses on the cards that already exist, and in all honesty, that makes sense, the Gol D. Roger Gold Super Parallel at $4,982 USD, the Manga Rare Luffy cards commanding four-figure prices, the OP-01 boxes that have gone from $100 USD to $4,000 USD, One Piece TCG beating the

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The Buyout Playbook: How to Spot a TCG Price Spike Before It Happens

Leave a Comment / TCG Finance & Investment, TCG Investing 101 / The Professor

By the time a card is trending on social media, the opportunity is gone, looongggg goneeeee. We want to be very clear about that upfront, because it is the most important sentence in this article and everything else builds on it. The collectors/investors who profit from TCG price spikes are almost never the ones reacting

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PSA 10 vs BGS 9.5 vs BGS Black Label: Which Grade Actually Makes You More Money?

Leave a Comment / Slabs & Stacks, TCG Finance & Investment / The Professor

Walk into any online TCG community and you will find this argument happening on a daily basis, kinda…maybe… well, you can imagine it. Someone posts a freshly slabbed card, the comment section immediately splits, PSA 10 is king, BGS 9.5 is underrated, the Black Label is the only one that truly matters. Everyone has an

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TCG Cards vs Gold: How Did Cardboard Stack Up Against the World’s Oldest Store of Value in H1 2026?

1 Comment / Cards vs Capital, TCG Finance & Investment / The Professor

Gold has been a store of value for roughly five thousand years, a little while before TCGs came onto the market. Trading cards have been around for about thirty. On paper, this should be the most lopsided comparison in our entire Cards vs Capital series. And yet H1 2026 threw up a genuinely interesting result,

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Is Palworld TCG the Next Big Investment Opportunity Or Are We Getting Played?

Leave a Comment / TCG Finance & Investment / The Professor

Let us get one thing straight before we go anywhere near the investment case: the Palworld Official Card Game launching on July 30, 2026, nine days from the time we are writing this, is one of the most commercially interesting TCG launch windows we have seen in years. Three and a half million booster packs

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