Trading Card Games (TCG), and generally any item relying on gacha mechanics, are this generation's "scratchers".

It's amazing seeing grown adults who would scoff at their peers buying lotto tickets and scratchers enthusiastically burn cash on TCG without the slightest sense of hypocrisy.

The secret is "social head canon".

"Head canon" is when you fill in the plot holes to make sense of your favorite narratives.

"Social head canon" is the same but for our understanding of society.

When the algorithm feeds children videos of adults opening TCG packs what they see is grown adults, the people who are appear to, and are supposed to, have it all figured out, losing their shit over cardboard and the child fills in the "why" on their own.

But they are wholly ignorant of "gambler's high" so they concoct elaborate narratives for why the adults "love the cards". That "social head canon" is so sticky because it can be anything, infinitely complex, wholly private, and different for every person.

Once that child grows up they learn about "gambler's high" and so seek the same thing, but now for the intended reasons.

Rinse and repeat across generations.

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nippoo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Except scratch cards are a guaranteed statistical loss. Trading cards, if you're skilled and know what you're doing, can be a sensible side-income.

It's the difference between poker and roulette...

	▲	NDlurker an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You can pretty much be guaranteed to break even if you check the odds of scratch tickets and buy enough of them. You can check how many tickets are left and which prizes are left for a particular game. That's what we did when I went in on a bunch of tickets with some friends. Speaking of trading cards as a side hustle, a couple of my friends used to drive around the region buying boxes of baseball cards. They'd weigh them to figure out if some specific special cards was in it, return the light boxes, and throw out most of the other cards from the boxes they opened. Now that same card series has unopened boxes going for like $2k
	▲	pokememon an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Another similarity is the endless line of credulous people who "have a system".