• @[email protected]
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      1610 months ago

      I would say yes, they are unregulated gambling. People also spend ludicrous amounts of money on cards. Though I don’t think that should factor into whether or not something is or isn’t unregulated gambling. It’s the chance product, not the money spent on it.

        • @Arbiter
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          910 months ago

          Valve literally runs a marketplace that allows people to sell their skins for cash.

          This is like playing for tokens that the store across the street will conveniently purchase from you.

        • @[email protected]
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          810 months ago

          Trading cards and gambling addiction have been studied for years. TCGs may not function the same as a slot machine, but it does trigger the same thing in your brain.

          And that is what’s dangerous.

        • ampersandrew
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          310 months ago

          You’re right. TCGs with blind draw boosters are also bad. I didn’t complain about Pokemon cards back in 2000 because I was a child and didn’t comprehend that that was what I was doing. I definitely stopped partaking in Magic: The Gathering as an adult though when I realized it was a neverending gambling treadmill. Today I frequent fighting game locals that are kept afloat by Yu Gi Oh gambling addicts who fill the trash cans with booster wrappers as they go back to the counter over and over again to buy more packs.

        • @[email protected]
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          010 months ago

          So those cards have been around forever, and no one complained about them.

          There have definitely been complaints about gambling in relation to collectible cards. I don’t think anything has come of them in legal terms, but many complaints have been voiced.

    • @[email protected]
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      110 months ago

      Many would say so. Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Magic the Gathering, have worked very hard at balancing the two sides of the coin. On one side, they design cards such that power levels determine the demand (and thus price) for rarer cards on the resale market, and on the other they argue that the cards have no intrinsic value so that buying packs can’t count as gambling since there’s technically no expected profit for the buyers.