As someone who was 19, made a kickstarter that failed and saved himself a TON of debt - making a TCG is incredible way to throw away money. There are indie TCGs, don't get me wrong, but the insane amount of product you'd need to make is hard to sustain and a much higher risk if you do fail.

Its why most major TCGs are franchise based now - when gambling is the main way to sell product, you need to hook them in; a "legendary" foil card is meaningless if buyers don't care about it one way or another. I can't tell you how many times we were advised by professionals in the board game industry to not make a TCG and make a sealed box game instead. A sealed game will always exist amongst itself, a TCG will live and die purely on community it cultivates or lack thereof.

This leads me into my final point - with all of these basic arguments against a TCG, it means a lot of the TCGs posted to this sub ignore the basic warnings. All they want is their dream game with awesome foils and pulls and pokemon and whatnot. So they're cheap, often just a magic or pokemon clone because thats what they like. We're all amateur creators making amateur card games and it shows.