55 Famous Failed Card Games

Collectible Card Game History

Jon Torrey
25 min readJul 11, 2021

👋 Hi there, Jon here! It’s been over a year since I wrote this article and Gary Vaynerchuk shared it across all of his socials. A lot of what’s in this article has already played out in the NFT market, but it also playing out in the wider market with the downturn. I just launched a new e-mail newsletter, which documents my story from quitting a job I hated to starting a 7-figure business and everything in between. If you want to read more, check out the Two Roads Newsletter here.

Pokemon, Magic: The Gathering, and Yu-Gi-Oh! are the big three when it comes to popular and lasting trading card games. While we all may be very familiar with these trading card games at some level, we may not realize how many other card games were discontinued on the way there.

Below is a list of 55 famous trading card games that failed and are currently out of print. There are plenty of examples outside of this list, but the below games demonstrate that even strong IP, a fanbase, and medium-term sustained popularity don’t guarantee success in the long term.

This list is ordered based on the release date (earliest to latest). For this specific list, “failure” is defined as out-of-print/discontinued. It can be argued that many of these games were successful for a set period of time, and brought many players joy, but compared to the Big Three referenced above, these games fall short of their comparable marks.

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