James Chillcott

I feel like a big part of the issue with this is that Wizards spent many years training players to care about every set and card before moving into the "this product is not for you" era and trying to teach everyone the opposite.

The TCG Landscape Is Shifting The 30th anniversary will mark the end of Modern Pokémon being viewed as a quality investment class within TCGs. There will still be plenty of collectors. The artwork is extremely popular, the IP is timeless, and the abundance of modern product makes it incredibly easy to collect. But that abundance is also the problem. There is an enormous amount of money currently tied up in Modern Pokémon sealed product and slabs. As supply continues to expand and the market becomes increasingly saturated, a meaningful portion of that capital will eventually start looking for stronger assets elsewhere. Enter Dragon Ball This is where Dragon Ball Fusion World enters parabolic growth. The timing could not align much better. Capital begins searching for scarcer assets at the same time Dragon Ball anime and content resume, bringing one of the most globally beloved IPs and its new flagship TCG into center stage. There is also a generational component here. A massive portion of the Dragon Ball fanbase that grew up with DBZ is now entering its 30s and 40s, with significantly more disposable income to put toward nostalgia and collecting. The Scarcity Multiplier Dragon Ball doesn’t need Pokémon-sized capital flows for the effect to be enormous. The investable supply of desirable Dragon Ball cards is dramatically smaller. Even a fraction of the capital currently sitting in Modern Pokémon rotating into this market could have an outsized impact. And Dragon Ball has something Modern Pokémon could not be further from having right now: Scarcity. The scarcity of Fusion World, combined with the diehard nature and global scale of the Dragon Ball fandom, will show the TCG space what an absolute monster Dragon Ball cards can become over the coming years. And I don’t think this will be limited to Fusion World. Super Divers, vintage Dragon Ball, and potentially select cards from other sets will benefit as well. Obviously, Dragon Ball won’t be the only beneficiary of this search for liquidity. Gundam, Riftbound, and other emerging TCG markets will absorb some of that capital as well. But of all of them, I believe Dragon Ball has the ingredients to be the biggest mover. The Opportunity The biggest opportunities in collectibles rarely come from discovering the next great IP. They come from recognizing when an already proven one is dramatically underrepresented by its collectibles market. That is where I believe Dragon Ball sits today. The demand doesn’t need to appear overnight, and Dragon Ball cards don’t need to become Pokémon. With supply this thin, the equation changes quickly as more collectors begin competing for the same genuinely scarce cards. Fusion World can be the catalyst that finally brings that attention to the broader Dragon Ball card ecosystem. When that happens, I think people will look back at this period and wonder how cards from an IP of this magnitude, with this level of scarcity, were ever valued this cheaply.