The Top Selling TCGs of 2025 According to TCGPlayer
2025 has been a thrilling year for TCGs to say the least. But what TCG sold the most? Did a rookie TCG offset the big established brands, or did the Big Three continue to dominate?
Below, we’ll be looking at TCGPlayer’s market report for the top performing TCGs for Q4 of 2025. This market report is very telling as Q4 is the biggest shopping period of the year. It also had several massive sets from the top card games like Phantasmal Flames and Avatar the Last Airbender. As such, this report is a very solid indicator of where the TCG industry is going.
In this article, I’m going to first be sharing the insights presented by TCGPlayer. But more than that, I’m going to break down what they mean, and combine them with the ICv2 data that came out in the spring of 2025 to get a holistic picture of where the broader TCG market is headed.
The Top 10 highest grossing TCGs of Q4 2025 on TCGPlayer
Below you will find the top 10 highest grossing TCGs on TCGPlayer. However, as we’ll discuss in more detail below, it’s important to remember that TCGPlayer – despite being a massive market for TCGs – is only one channel. Plenty more channels exist in the TCG world ranging from big box stores to local card shops, and all of that will likely impact the final ranking that we should have from ICv2 sometime in 2026.
| Rank (Q4 2025) | Game | Rank (Previous Quarter) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Magic: The Gathering | 1 |
| 2 | Pokémon | 2 |
| 3 | One Piece Card Game | 4 |
| 4 | Yu-Gi-Oh! | 3 |
| 5 | Riftbound | New |
| 6 | Disney Lorcana | 6 |
| 7 | Pokémon Japan | 7 |
| 8 | Gundam Card Game | 5 |
| 9 | Digimon Card Game | 8 |
| 10 | Star Wars: Unlimited | 9 |
Lorcana continues its steady decline
Riftbound fans will likely let out a combined “whoop” of excitement at seeing their favorite new game top former TCG heavyweight, Lorcana, on this list. Indeed, from the very start Riftbound seemed poised to take over Lorcana’s place as favorite new TCG, and that was well before the game began to show clear signs of slippage.
Lorcana already had all the hallmarks of a TCG in decline – competitive play issues, dropping card prices on the singles market, and slipping from the coveted third spot on ICv2’s “Top Collectible Card Games” list down to fifth overall behind One Piece. That’s a pretty large drop – going from breaking into the Big Three to playing second fiddle to One Piece.
Now, however, it seems that Lorcana has dropped even further. While it was also fifth highest grossing game of 2024 by TCGPlayer’s own estimates as well as by ICv2’s, here we see it fall all the way down to sixth place two consecutive quarters in a row.
If that doesn’t essentially solidify Lorcana’s drop from the top of TCG world, I don’t know what does, and it seems unlikely at this point that the Disney card game will change course anytime soon. Sure – the game isn’t likely to go away completely. It will remain a niche TCG enjoyed by Disney fans for a long time. But I doubt it will ever rival the likes of Pokemon or Magic again.
One Piece continues its rise to the top
The data and hype around One Piece has shown that TCG’s steady rise for some time, and now it seems almost inevitable that the “Big Three” will be reshaped by this hit card game. Whether One Piece will take Yu-Gi-Oh!’s place entirely or remain at number four spot remains to be seen once we get a more full picture via ICv2’s report in 2026. Based on this data, however, it seems highly likely that One Piece will find its place in the Big Three.
Hype becomes a huge sales driver for brand new TCGs
One insight into the rankings you’ll find above may not be fully apparent right away, but it is there hiding in the shadows. And that is this: hype now plays a huge role in shaping the sales of any given TCG in its early days.
This is a relatively new trend. Before Lorcana came around back in 2023, I think most people generally accepted that there was a big three in TCGs, and that everything else was just a niche TCG. And then Lorcana did the impossible: it topped the charts at an incredible #3 for overall sales in its debut year.
As incredible as that achievement was, it was not meant to last, and excitement for Disney Lorcana eventually subsided, as can be seen clearly in this data.
However, Lorcana’s impact has not gone away. Essentially, Lorcana proved that a decent enough TCG backed by a strong enough IP can in fact gain incredible momentum to disrupt the TCG industry. And this “new TCG hype” pattern can be seen playing out more than once in 2025.
Why did new TCGs fail to get hype before?
This clear trend towards bankable “newness” in the TCG world really is a sign of the times. The reason it used to be so hard for a TCG to break out and become big when that happens all the time with video games is that TCGs typically need a physical community factor behind them in order to take off. Sure, many will be contented with playing on the famous “kitchen table,” but more desire locations to play in, groups to battle against, and even potentially large events to go to, or a defined market to sell to.
That’s an incredible amount of infrastructure to build up overnight to support a new TCG, yet Lorcana proved it was possible.
Whereas in the past it took an insane amount of work to get a TCG in front of new people, thanks largely to technology – social media – and a growing number of people interested in and willing to invest in TCGs as a whole, creating hype to propel a new game to the top is not only possible in 2025, it’s becoming predictable.
Gundam drops, Riftbound Rises
While Lorcana’s rise and eventual fall might be a perfect case study for this phenomenon, we’ve seen it occur now more than once in 2025. The first example of this phenomenon from 2025 is none other than the tremendously fun Gundam Card Game.
Launched mid-July, the Gundam Card Game saw tremendous success right out the gate. Products sold out quickly, prices for meta-relevant cards soared, and attendance at leagues and special events skyrocketed.
For a moment in time, it felt like the big new TCG for anyone paying attention, and TCGPlayer itself reported the Gundam Card Game clocking in at a more-than-impressive fifth place for that quarter, ahead of Lorcana, and just behind One Piece.
And yet, now what do we see just one measly quarter later? Riftbound has eaten Gundam’s cake as rookie of the year, taking fifth place while Gundam drops all the way down to eighth!
That’s an incredible drop and the greatest among all of the top TCGs this quarter, signaling that when it comes to new TCGs, initial hype is more of a huge driver for initial sales, and not necessarily a great indicator of future success – at least not at the same level.
Where is UNION ARENA?
Now, before closing this article out or making more general observations like how the Pokemon TCG continues to dominate the market, or how Magic’s continued focus on collecting popular IPs to drive sales is paying off in 2025 more than ever before, I have to ask the question that many of my readers might also be asking: what about UNION ARENA, Bandai’s Anime IP Crossover TCG?
If I’m going to be honest, the one TCG I’m the most surprised to see not show up in TCGPlayer’s top 10 is UNION ARENA – especially given how big Q4 has been for that game. And lest you think this is some sort of favoritism making me question UNION ARENA’s absence on this list (my website is, after all, the top independent blog for UNION ARENA content), my questions are more data-driven than simply born out of fondness for this amazing game.
I’ll go over all of this in a moment, but to start with, it could simply be due to one thing alone: perhaps UNION ARENA sells much better via sales channels other than TCGPlayer.
UNION ARENA and the differences of sales channels
The reason actually for why I am so surprised to not see UNION ARENA on this list is this: UNION ARENA’s main competitor, Weiss Schwarz, made an impressive eighth place overall on ICv2’s much more definitive list of top Collectible Card Games for 2024. As noted in the report itself, this placement was driven largely by its phenomenally successful NIKKE set released similarly towards the end of 2024.
While the point on NIKKE being the primary reason for Weiss’s success in 2024 massive was included in the report more anecdotally than as matter-of-fact, it’s a story that has stuck in my mind ever since I first read it in the ICv2 annual 2025 issue. Indeed, I took it to mean that UNION ARENA – which seems to be outperforming Wiess Schwarz this year – would see a similarly huge boost in sales once that set came out.
So then where in the world is UNION ARENA on the top 10? Is it just so much of a stronger sell via hobby channels than via a massive marketplace like TCGPlayer? Or have these other massive games that came out in 2025 simply pushed smaller niche TCGs out of the running for top ten entirely?
While we won’t have a definitive answer for this for some time – at least not until we get those coveted rankings from ICv2 in 2026 – I wouldn’t count UNION ARENA out of the running just yet. While it may not be a top 10 performer on TCGPlayer, I could still see it making the top 10 when it comes to overall sales that include big box stores and most importantly local hobby shops where my guess is UNION ARENA sells the best.
