The Fastest-Growing TCG Markets Right Now (and Why It Isn’t Pokémon)

Data from TCGIndex, as of 15 June 2026. Figures track each game’s market value index over the trailing 90 days.

Ask almost anyone which trading card game is the best investment and you will hear the same answer: Pokémon. By sheer size, that answer is right. Pokémon is the largest market we track by a wide margin, roughly on par with Magic: The Gathering and several times larger than anything else.

But “biggest” and “fastest-growing” are not the same thing, and if you are putting money in today the second one matters more. So I pulled the numbers across all 14 games we track at TCGIndex and ranked them by how much each market actually moved over the last 90 days. The result surprised me, and it is the best argument I know for not watching one game in isolation.

Pokémon is only the 7th fastest-growing TCG over the last 90 days

Here is the trailing-90-day change in market value for every game we track, biggest mover to worst:

• Disney Lorcana: +29.1%
• Dragon Ball Super (Fusion World): +19.8%
• Union Arena: +18.0%
• One Piece: +18.0%
• Sorcery (Contested Realm): +14.5%
• Gundam: +9.7%
• Pokémon: +9.5%
• Magic: The Gathering: +6.6%
• Yu-Gi-Oh: +4.1%
• Flesh and Blood: +0.6%
• Digimon: +0.2%
• Grand Archive: -0.2%
• Star Wars Unlimited: -1.8%
• Riftbound: -24.1%

Pokémon rose a healthy +9.5%, and there is nothing wrong with that. But Disney Lorcana grew three times faster, and Dragon Ball Super, Union Arena and One Piece all roughly doubled Pokémon’s pace. If your whole picture of “the card market” came from watching Pokémon prices, you would have completely missed where the real money moved this quarter.

The card market is not one market. It is fourteen, and they do not move together.

The money rotated into anime-driven challengers

Look at the top of that table and a pattern jumps out: the fastest growth is in the mid-sized, anime-fuelled games, not the giants. The two largest markets, Pokémon and Magic, were the steady-but-slow part of the quarter. You see the same thing at the set level, where it gets even more vivid. These were the standout individual set moves over the same 90 days (I have left out anything released in the last four months, because a brand-new set climbing from near zero produces a meaningless percentage):

• Union Arena, the Demon Slayer set: +196%
• One Piece, Extra Booster Anime 25th Collection: +168% (a serious set, worth over $30,000)
• Gundam, Newtype Rising: +129%
• Yu-Gi-Oh, The Legend of Blue-Eyes White Dragon: +118% (yes, the original 2002 base set)
• Dragon Ball Super, Fusion World Energy Markers: +101%
• Gundam, Edition Beta: +80% (a set worth over $50,000)
• Disney Lorcana, Fabled: +77%
• One Piece, Promotion Cards: +65% (on a set worth over $180,000)

Anime crossovers and iconic vintage did the heavy lifting this quarter. The hype-driven brand names did not.

And new hype games can hurt you

The bottom of the table matters just as much. Riftbound, the newest and most-hyped launch of the bunch, fell 24% over 90 days. That is the textbook shape of a hype-driven release: a launch spike, then a long slide as supply catches up and the early premium drains out. The lesson is not to avoid new games. It is that a new game’s first 90 days on the market tell you almost nothing, and the percentage move on a set that did not exist a quarter ago is noise, not signal. That is why the table above ignores anything that recent.

What an investor should actually take from this

Three things.

First, breadth beats loyalty. The single biggest mistake I see is treating “card investing” as “Pokémon investing”. Pokémon is a fine, deep, liquid market. It was also the 7th best-performing game this quarter. If you are not at least watching where capital is rotating across games, you are flying with one eye closed.

Second, the set is the unit that matters, not the single card. Every number above is a set-level figure. A set can be quietly climbing 20% while the one chase card you happen to watch sits flat, and the other way around. Tracking value at the set level is the only way to see the trend before it shows up in the headline cards.

Third, treat new launches with patience. The worst performer on the list is the newest game. The best individual movers are mostly a year or more old. Time on the market is information.

These figures come from TCGIndex, where we track the secondary-market value of every set across 14 trading card games and update it continuously. Every game and set page is public and live, so the numbers will have moved by the time you read this. That is rather the point of watching a market instead of a snapshot. The live versions are at tcgindex.io.

TCGIndex provides market data and analysis, not financial advice. Trading cards are collectibles whose prices can fall as well as rise. Do your own research before buying or selling anything.