What it’s Like to Run a Trading Card Game Blog

Me around the time JosephWriterAnderson.com was founded

After an evening of In-N-Out Burger and lines on a graph going down, down, spiraling down, the news in my web analytics proved my worst fears correct: my hard work – the pinnacle of years of development – had amounted to nothing. In a fell swoop it seemed, my ambitions for my website were gone.

How did I get here?

Nine months earlier I made the somewhat belated decision to dedicate JosephWriterAnderson.com fully to trading card games, or TCGs.

With that newfound focus, the real game began, one with incredible highs, and deep lows. I was a TCG blogger. It would take some time, however, before I knew what that really would mean.

What it’s like to run a successful TCG blog

Somewhere along the lines from there until now, I realized there were plenty of people who would be interested in a behind the scenes look at what it’s like to build something consumed by millions of TCG fans every year. Strangely enough, I have the reverse problem of many – I have no idea what this sort of thing looks like from the outside. I was thrust invariably into it by my own inexhaustible hunger for something I almost can’t explain – trading card games.

While in this space video content tends to reign supreme, a healthy and vibrant written scene is afoot, and it’s not often talked about enough.

So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like on the other side of the page, this one’s for you.

It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do

The cliche of the blogger (regardless of the niche) is well known – a somewhat lazy, entitled person apt at writing blogs in their underwear for pennies. While I won’t comment on the state of my attire while writing this particular blog, I can personally attest to the utter falsity of that cliche. That caricature exists as far from the truth as Pluto from our moon.

A successful blogger is something more akin to an athlete, or an entrepreneur – someone who is willing to strive for greatness each and every day regardless of the eyes on him or her, regardless, even at times against better judgement, of the outcome. As I point out on the about page for this website, the incredible vast majority of blogs fail. Very, very few succeed. It feels like all that separates someone from success and failure in this space is how willing they are to run the gauntlet. Doing so in the blogging space is one of the most brutal things you could do. For that reason among many – but that reason also alone – so many will never make it through to the other side.

It’s a labor of love

There are people who create blogs these days with articles and words stitched together from other people’s work and bots and call it a day. Those aren’t the ones you want to read and they aren’t this one. Instead, the best blogs are labors of love. Someone like me worked on them well before you read them. In my case, for years. All for the chance to surface one day during your rabbit hole web search about a new deck strategy so that you can read in an F-shape pattern before skimming onwards to the next post.

You could approach this thing without love for the sake of money alone, but your readership would resemble that of the silence of the morgue on the outskirts of town.

It’s an expensive undertaking

Those first two points could largely be applied to any blogging venture but this one applies specifically to TCGs. TCGs are incredibly expensive, and that’s as true for bloggers starting out as it is for anyone. For me, that meant spending far too much on insane projects like completing the entire collection of Evolving Skies (only to sell them back not much later) or picking up far too many products in a month to see what kind of chase cards I could pull.

The lessons learned from these activities were great, but you could easily be scared away by these upfront costs.

The game is half the battle

If you write about TCGs and make money from that, the game itself is only (at most) half the battle. Winning or losing – the thing that takes up the majority of a TCG players mind – matters far less than the art of discovery inherent to the creative deck building process, or the joys of being the one to pull that secret rare everyone else wanted from a Wallgreens Blister.

You can’t be a great blogger from playing the game alone. But you can’t be a great blogger without playing the game.

So much goes into the crafting of a piece, but when you own your own website like I do, even the writing isn’t the only thing you have to worry about.

It takes an unlikely collection of disparate skills to be good at this

Something that has continued to surprise me in my journey as a TCG blogger is how many skills it takes to actually be good at it. You have to have a deep understanding of a game (or games) that changes drastically every few months, while also staying on top of new trends, cards and upcoming expansions and spoilers. You have to know what those things mean to players, and collectors, and what the difference is between the two.

But again, the game is only half the battle. You then have to know how to write something and that’s hard if you want what you write to actually be read. Then there’s the technical skills required to actually build and develop a website. One day you pay your subscription fee to some web builder and the next day you are dealing with complex code trying to reduce the cumulative layout shift of your page (don’t ask me about it).

And that’s not even all there is – your job still isn’t done. There’s marketing skills you need to get your stuff in front of people, SEO skills, and the business acumen to make the right relationships with the right people.

Running a TCG blog really is no small matter.

You’ll impact more people than you ever though was possible

Lastly, and to end on a slightly more uplifting note, the reality is that at the end of the day the thing that matters most about the blog isn’t the money you make from it or what it says in your data and analytics – it’s the people who get enjoyment from what you write.

That realization came to me many years after publishing the homepage for JosephWriterAnderson.com. If you build something that people enjoy, it becomes bigger than you. In a weird way, it sort of belongs to them, too.

I wanted to entertain people

At the very beginning, well before this site became a TCG site, I knew I wanted to entertain people. Entertainment is one of the best things you can offer someone in a cynical world often devoid of real joy. I wanted to give them something that would make them happy, even if only in a small way, for a small amount of time.

I didn’t imagine the impact it would have

After getting serious about the blog, I spent long hours in front of my screen pondering the best ways to grow my site. By that time, the thing had become a business and there was financial incentive to massive growth. Weirdly, despite the ideals that had helped me start the blog – the desire to be a part of a positive entertainment experience where people could really find joy – in some ways I wasn’t thinking about people at all. The business aspect of blogging was in the driver’s seat, for a time. I had lost touch with my purpose for blogging, and eventually, my love for TCGs.

But writing a blog about something so many people are so deeply passionate about without connecting with that passion yourself can feel lifeless. It wasn’t until I heard the stories of people deeply connecting with what I wrote that I once again rediscovered my original purpose. And eventually, my love for TCGs would return as strong as ever.

The point here is that money is great, and being successful is great, but weirdly what is most fulfilling about blogging is knowing you’re making people’s lives better by doing it. And that’s enough to keep you going despite the highs and the lows. Speaking of…

Blogging is filled with highs and lows

I watched this video recently from this guy who gave a great talk at Stanford Business School talking about how we have a misconception about what a good life looks like. We all think that if we play our cards right, life will just be easy. The reality is once again far from the truth. A good life does not excuse you from hardship, and neither does success.

The very hardest thing about blogging is learning to deal with the highs and the lows. I started this story with a catastrophic dip in traffic that I experienced after tireless hours of hard work. Luckily I can tell this story now because that dip didn’t last and the blog continues to grow. But these sorts of things are enough to break the will of many, many bloggers and creators.

Anything worth doing, in the end, is like that. And it makes the upside worth sticking it out for.