One game that particularly caught my eye when I was younger was the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game. Now that I’m older, I can see some of the drawbacks and benefits brought on by an early exposure to this hobby.

In terms of drawbacks, there is a fairly clear incentive for the entities behind the design, manufacturing, and distribution of the cards to get people invested in the game and to keep them spending money on their products. Furthermore, with the promotional material such as the anime generally being geared towards children, it could be argued that they are trying to get kids hooked while they are young and don’t see the full picture; some would say that they provide kids with a game of chance (e.g., opening random booster packs) that should be treated as gambling for kids and that this should not be celebrated.

In terms of benefits, the game allowed me to smugly summon the Dark Magician onto the field and unleash a Dark Magic Attack to avoid a trip to the Shadow Realm, a memory that is difficult to put a price on. On a serious note, however, this game gave us a new and fun intellectual property that is ingrained in the pop culture of a generation and surely generated a lot of great memories for a ton of us.

Importantly, the game got me to use my brain and lit a spark in my interest in statistics. For example, the dueling aspect of the hobby forced me to develop my decision-making by considering possible game states, associating probabilities to certain events, and updating my beliefs as partial information is unveiled throughout the duel. The collecting aspect made me think about the feasibility and probability of getting the specific cards I wanted for my collection and my deck. The investing aspect has now gotten me to think rigorously about the uncertainty in card conditions and prices and what that means for making good purchases.

As I’ve recently gotten back into learning about the many facets of the hobby, I’ll share some of the collecting and investing questions that have been on my mind.

The collecting section involves a fair bit of problem-solving, math, simulation, and parametric modeling and is found here.

The investing section focuses on thinking carefully about how to use data wisely to increase the quality of models that use it and is found here.