Collectible Card Game

A Collectible Card Game, also called a trading card game, is a genre of card game blending strategic deck building with the trading card format, pioneered by Magic: The Gathering, designed by Richard Garfield and released by Wizards of the Coast in 1993. Each specially designed card, sharing a consistent back design but bearing its own artwork and rules text on the front, represents a game element such as a creature, an enhancement, an event, a resource or a location; players typically start from a pre-built starter deck and then customise it over time through semi-random booster packs or trades with other players, and a typical game is a turn-based contest between two players, each drawing and playing from their own shuffled deck to reach a victory condition such as accumulating points or reducing an opponent to zero health, supported by accessories such as dice, counters, card sleeves and play mats. The genre favours fantasy and science fiction themes, though horror, cartoon, sports and licensed properties all appear as well: Magic's original 300 unique cards had grown to more than 30,000 by December 2025, and the game sold over one billion individual cards by the end of 1994 alone, with the genre as a whole peaking between 2008 and 2016 at more than 20 billion cards sold; Yu-Gi-Oh! had sold roughly 35 billion cards by January 2021 and Pokemon more than 75 billion by March 2025, while notable discontinued titles include Legend of the Five Rings, Star Wars and various World of Warcraft card games, and digital adaptations such as Hearthstone have carried the genre into online play.