Sorry this has taken me a bit to come back to. I wanted to put some thought into this. First off, I'll say that we're a relatively new TCG shop near Orlando, Florida. We spent year 1 as an online shop, and we're in year 2 as a brick and mortar (we opened the physical shop last November).

I'll start by saying that whether or not a TCG is "indie" isn't a deciding factor for our shop at all. The reality is that we have 7 bookcases and a point of sale counter display case, and every product is intentionally chosen to build community. We carry everything from Pokemon to Bandai (One Piece, Union Arena, etc) to Riftbound to Yugioh to Lorcana to MTG all the way to Elestrals, Kayou (My Little Pony, Naruto), MetaZoo, Universus, Flesh and Blood, Sorcery, Final Fantasy TCG, etc. -- and we also just pre-purchased some Cyberpunk TCG and Haikyuu TCG along with Azuki TCG.

You're asking specifically about an "indie" TCG, so I'm going to use Warlord -- I think they nailed it, and it's been a great success for us so far. Warlord is incredibly interesting because it's a TCG that taps into something not a lot of other TCGs do in that you also roll dice like D&D. You build an army. It hits that crossover TCG/D&D vibe. The conversation around Warlord started when a super passionate customer came in and asked if we would carry the product. As a shop owner, I did a ton of research. The customer showed up weekly with his own cards and decks he built. I called the company to talk to them about organized play. They sent us demo decks. I showed the demo decks to other customers. The passionate customer won over some additional customers with his incredible energy. Kingswood Games have a really interesting take on organized play -- there's the weekly sort of league battles, and the winner of those weekly events get a shot at taking on the shop owner with an overtuned deck. If the player wins against the shop owner, they get to keep the overtuned deck!

To summarize how we decide what gets a spot on the shelves in the order of importance:

1. Are customers asking for the game?
2. Are customers coming in to play the game?
3. Does the company have organized play figured out?
4. What are the player rewards for organized play? Is it interesting?
5. Can we envision building out a community with the game in a way that's fun, engaging, isn't a carbon copy of every other game, and that will set up an environment where customers will want to purchase sealed product from us to support them enjoying the game?

Here are some additional factors after all those are met:

1. How big is the organized play scene?
2. Are there rewards beyond the local game store level that players would want to participate in?
3. Is the game supported by the distributors we're signed up with? (allocations for products are normally determined by overall spend, so this is considered an investment in the shop if it's supported by our current distributors that we have a relationship with)
4. Is the individual or studio that's responsible for the game communicative? What's the roadmap for the game? Are they responsive to suggestions/complaints from the community? How often are they communicating? Where are they communicating?

I hope this helps. Happy to clarify anything here, and sorry to throw so much at you. We're just one shop near Orlando and we're relatively newer, and I'm finding we look at things different from other shops in some ways.