Everything You Need to Know About Trading Cards

This timely book looks at the impact on a generation of the three major trading card games that have stood the test of time - Magic the Gathering (1993), Pokemon (1996) and Yu-Gi-Oh! (1999)  - the creation, the story behind them, scandals and key cards, and the sometimes staggering prices which can be achieved at auction. Along the way the author covers how the games are played and why this matters to their success; banned cards - how certain artwork caused problems for European releases; printing problems in the early days and how to spot these; then on to how the values of the printing editions matter, how to spot fakes and identify the various editions, a brief history of some of the most nostalgic cards from each game and how much they are worth now / have changed over the course of time.  Roy Raftery also covers how the games were conceptualised by their owners, how they reached their audience, who bought them and why they became so desirable, tapping in to the zeitgeist for nostalgia associated with the ever-increasing popularity of collecting these cards.  It is published to mark the 30th anniversary of Pokemon’s release in Japan in 1996.