The Naruto Card Game is Finally Shown and Scalpers Are Already Here

**Alec Fields** (0:00)
Are you ready?

**Paul McGee** (0:04)
I am.

**Alec Fields** (0:05)
For The Pod of Greed?

**Paul McGee** (0:10)
Welcome back, guys. It's Thursday.

**Alec Fields** (0:13)
Wednesday for us.

**Paul McGee** (0:14)
And more importantly, it's the week after Gen Con.

**Alec Fields** (0:19)
That's right. For you guys who don't know or didn't know or forgot, we attended Gen Con this past week, and it was actually our very first Gen Con, so we have some events and stories to share about that.

**Paul McGee** (0:32)
Yeah. Load of fun for many reasons, but the primary reason why we're there was to check out the new Naruto trading card game. Shout out to Bandai. Yeah. Shout out to Bandai for inviting us. Shout out to the people that we met.
We will be talking about a lot of that and some other card game stuff and a few gaming stories that have popped up this week as well. And I think hopefully next week will be the debut of maybe a little podcast theme song.

**Alec Fields** (0:59)
Ooh, Paul's going to sing, yeah, Paul's going to sing.

**Paul McGee** (1:02)
In the works. I won't be singing, unfortunately, but...

**Alec Fields** (1:05)
Boo.

**Paul McGee** (1:06)
Yeah, so I guess first of all, Gen Con. What do we think?

**Alec Fields** (1:11)
You know, I've heard many stories about Gen Con, and for some reason, as usual, I horribly underestimated the event. You know, I hear, like, board game, tabletop convention, and so I start thinking, it's, you know, oh, this is very niche. It's going to be quite small and intimate, you know?

**Paul McGee** (1:36)
Anything but. Anything but.

**Alec Fields** (1:39)
Gen Con was absolutely massive.

**Paul McGee** (1:41)
It's huge, yeah.

**Alec Fields** (1:42)
To give you an idea of scale, I mean, Gen Con uses a chunk of downtown Indianapolis. The, almost the entirety of the convention center.
All the way to the Indianapolis Colts, the football team's stadium.

**Paul McGee** (2:02)
Yeah, Lucas Oil Stadium.

**Alec Fields** (2:04)
And they use all the space in between the stadium and the convention.

**Paul McGee** (2:10)
Yeah, it was crazy. They had so many things. They had, you know, like just loads of tabletop, right? Lots of the tabletop games that are...

**Alec Fields** (2:18)
We're talking about board games.

**Paul McGee** (2:19)
New and existing ones that are just getting off the ground and trying to kind of capture an audience. There's also a lot of like RPGs and like books.

**Alec Fields** (2:28)
Like the D&D style games.

**Paul McGee** (2:29)
Yeah, your D&D style game. There's a card game presence there for sure.

**Alec Fields** (2:33)
Yeah, there's still quite a few card games. No Yu-Gi-Oh.

**Paul McGee** (2:37)
Yeah, a lot of demos for card games. Big conspicuous absences, Yu-Gi-Oh, yeah.

**Alec Fields** (2:42)
Yeah, you know, card games aren't the biggest part of Gen Con. You know, board and more table-toppy style games are the central factor. But card games do, I would say, make up maybe 20% of the experience.

**Paul McGee** (2:58)
They do, and it is strange and weirdly, like, for you to be so absent.

**Alec Fields** (3:02)
Because every other card game was there.

**Paul McGee** (3:05)
Yeah, so Magic the Gathering has a very large presence there. They were actually debuting the Hobbit set, which I was told, I think, but the actual sneak peek of that is this weekend, right?

**Alec Fields** (3:16)
Yeah, so this was like a sneak sneak peek.

**Paul McGee** (3:19)
Yeah, and they pretty much were all of the Lucas Oil Stadium or whatever. Basically, that was dedicated to Magic. They had these dedicated rooms and stuff where they were doing premieres and little flight tournaments and stuff. So there was a lot of that.
Even Play Pokémon was there. So there wasn't an official Pokémon exhibit booth, but there was organized Play Pokémon happening in the event hall.

**Alec Fields** (3:48)
Bandai was there in a big way.

**Paul McGee** (3:49)
Yeah, they were doing regionals, right?

**Alec Fields** (3:52)
Yeah, they were doing the regionals for all their major card games, and then of course, debuting the Naruto Card Game as well.

**Paul McGee** (4:01)
Plus, again, I saw that had a lot of presence was Riftbound.

**Alec Fields** (4:05)
Riftbound was huge. Yeah, Riftbound was really huge.

**Paul McGee** (4:07)
I've heard that that's really been taking off in the last few months. It's kind of begun to gain some momentum. I even saw, and it's not really related to Gen Con, but I even saw this picture from TCG Player that was saying that Riftbound has overtook maybe even one piece or something, or maybe Yu-Gi-Oh one quarter for most sales of products on TCG.