Wizards of the Coast made card scarcity the product

Richard Garfield's trading card game, patented by Wizards of the Coast with priority in June 1994, has players construct their own decks from a private pool of cards, then duel with mana-fueled spells, tapping cards for energy, until one player's twenty life points run out.

The complete collection numbers in the hundreds, 302 cards in the patent's embodiment, tiered by print run: commons with virtually unlimited distribution, uncommons with limited publication, and rares with restricted publication. No card carries any indication of its tier, and border colors distinguish editions. Limited availability, the patent notes, increases component value and encourages trading.

The game is engineered so that owning the game means owning pieces of it. Because each player must preselect a personal library from their own pool, more and better cards are competitive advantage; because the publisher controls print runs by tier, scarcity does the pricing. Players acquire cards by retail purchase, trading, or winning them, and the optional ante rule even makes cards themselves the stakes. The aftermarket the design creates, trading, valuation, rarity-hunting, is unpaid marketing that drives retail sales of new product.

Made the game consume its own components: tiered, tradable card scarcity turns every match into an ad for buying more, and the aftermarket prices the product for you.

Deck-building ties spending to competitive progress, so players buy more cards to improve.

Unmarked rarity sustains discovery in every purchase, keeping the thrill of opening packs.

Trading creates social circulation and secondary-market price discovery, keeping the ecosystem alive between releases.

If your product has repeat use, consider selling scarce, tiered components that players accumulate, so the aftermarket drives sales.

Patented (US 5662332A, granted 1997, expired 2014); the trading-card-game format it defined spread across the industry. The collectible-component model, tiered or randomized pieces sold continuously, now runs from blind-box toys to gacha video games and loot boxes.