Much like May 2025 (see "Pack Prices Too Cheap?"), the story of the TCG market was pretty much Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy, and more Final Fantasy. There were 11 total Magic: The Gathering - Final Fantasy products on the June chart. The set is completely on fire with serialized Chocobos selling for tens of thousands of dollars and Collector Booster Boxes ending the month selling for about $1200 a pop (up from around $700 at the beginning of the month). That's $100 per Collector's Pack, which is over double the MSRP of $37.99. The frenzy over this Magic set is absolutely insane, and more or less drowning out any noise made by any other TCGs that aren't named "Pokemon."
The action on this set brings about a couple points of interest. For one, this is a Standard set, which means that players need to be able to obtain the cards in this set to play Magic's base competitive format. This means that Play Boosters for this set will likely need to be in print for a while. As more product gets released, some of the singles prices should cool off a bit for non-parallel, non-Special Guest, and non-serialized cards. In short, FLGSs should probably continue to strike while the iron is hot with singles sales.
The second point of interest is in regard to the upcoming Spider-Man set (see "Product Line Deets Revealed"). If Final Fantasy was this crazy, what in the world is the FOMO for Spider-Man going to be like? Wizards of the Coast received its first data on that last November when they placed Secret Lair X Marvel onto preorder and the Internet promptly broke their ordering portal (see "Queue Pauses within Minutes of Forming"). Their second bit of data came via the Secret Lair X Marvel's Deadpool drop set, which they handled differently by making sure there was a retail release for the set (see "'Secret Lair X Marvel's Deadpool' into Retail"). That set also sold out online, and retailers did well with these sets in stores.It should be noted that the two previous Magic: The Gathering X Marvel releases are by no means Spider-Man, who is easily the most beloved individual character in the whole MCU by far. The Spider-Man movie franchise has racked up over $9 billion in box office receipts worldwide and the webslinger and his friends have millions of fans across multiple generations dating back to the 1960s.
Another big Spider-Man question on the table is the scale of the potential crossover between the two fandoms. Final Fantasy had one big advantage for crossing over into the realm of Magic fans; at its core, the video game brand was a sword and sorcery fantasy IP. Like the Lord of the Rings set, Final Fantasy could be integrated into the Magic Multiverse seamlessly because they were both fantasy IPs.Spider-Man doesn't have the fantasy IP integration advantage, but that probably won't matter too much because Marvel fans generally like the famous webslinger a whole lot and tend to glom onto any collectable with his face on it. The set will also feature Venom, Ghost-Spider, and other popular Marvel characters, so it will probably be a big hit even if it doesn't turn out to be a Final Fantasy-sized hit.