they can buy pokemon cards. To be honest, I don't think CS:GO or TF2 or the like are pro-gambling. You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling.
Look at the "meta-"game mechanics: you play a few games, you get a guaranteed case drop. This circa $3 case could contain anything, a $0.2 skin or a rare $2500 knife. When you open it a casino-like wheel goes over all the items and selects one randomly. There are hundreds of YT/twitch channels that open cases all day long and their target audience is children. It's gambling, and it's gambling for children.
I'm honestly really not a fan of the collectable trading card type of games (MtG, Pokemon TCG, yu-gi-oh etc). You have to pay to have a chance of getting a good card, which makes the whole thing pay to win. It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you, without having to pay more for having specific cards that you want to complete your ideal deck.
I personally often go to the huge bins of "shit tier" cards that my local game stores have, because I like to have some pretty cards (I often use them as bookmarks), but I don't play the game itself, so the actual mechanical value of the cards is meaningless to me
EDIT: I feel the same way about things like Warhammer. I don't know about other games, but in Warhammer at least there is a limit on how powerful an overall army can be, so sure it may not look as visually good, but just having tokens that say "squad of soldiers" or "mega death tank of doom" should be perfectly acceptable too
> It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you
Unless you play Pokemon TCG or MTG competitively at a national/international level, proxy cards are mostly accepted in the community.
More and more people recognise Nintendo and Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) have money in their eyes in the card games. Pokemon cards are becoming more full-art because that's what sells for crazy markups on third party websites, and MTG are doing crossovers with whoever will sign them a license. They're both playing a risk by moving from old time players (many of whom are now leaving the hobbies) for the sake of some nostalgic "investors".
I just wish I had a local shop with a shitbin. The shops around me just sell packs (when not out of stock) and they're all marked up beyond MSRP. I just want to play the game. I don't care about art, holographic patterns and the like.
On the other hand, whenever people open packs just looking for collectable cards, they flood the market with job lots of regular cards at dirt cheap prices. I managed to get a joblot of 2500+ Pokemon TCG cards for around £20 (lots of duplicates, all regular).
