Trading card game (TCG) glossary

New-set announcements are full of jargon. Here are the essentials.

Products

• Booster pack — A sealed pack of random cards from one set. The basic product.
• Booster box / display — A box holding a fixed number of packs (often 24 or 36). Cheaper per pack than buying packs one by one.
• Case — Several booster boxes packed together, mostly bought by stores.
• Starter deck / trial deck / structure deck — A complete, ready-to-play deck with no randomness. Ideal to begin.
• Collection box / premium collection / Elite Trainer Box — A box combining packs, one or more promo cards and accessories.
• Promo — A card handed out outside booster packs: in a box, at a tournament, in a magazine or at a store.
• Sealed — An unopened product. Some collectors only collect sealed product.

Cards and rarities

• Rarity — How often a card appears in packs (common, uncommon, rare, then higher rarities specific to each game).
• Holo / foil — A card with a shiny finish.
• Alt-art (alternate art) — The same card with new artwork, often much rarer.
• Secret rare — A card numbered beyond the set's official total, highly sought after.
• Signed card — A card reproducing a voice actor's or illustrator's signature, common in Weiß Schwarz and Union Arena.
• Serial-numbered — A card printed in a limited number of copies, each one numbered.
• Pull rate — The odds of finding a card or a rarity in a pack.
• Reprint — A new print run of a card or product released before.

Play and tournaments

• Set / expansion — A group of new cards released together, with a name and often a code (for example OP-18).
• Format — Rules defining which cards are allowed: Standard (recent cards), larger formats, Commander…
• Banlist — The official list of banned or limited cards in a format. One update can reshape the game.
• Meta — The most played and most successful decks at a given time.
• Prerelease — A tournament held a few days before a set's release, where you play the new cards first.
• Playset — The maximum number of copies of one card allowed in a deck (often 4).
• Sideboard — Spare cards you can swap in between games of a match.

Market

• Singles — Cards sold individually, the cheapest way to finish a deck.
• MSRP — The publisher's suggested retail price. Store prices can differ.
• Preorder — Reserving a product before its release.

Versions and regions

• JP / EN / FR — The language of the edition. Many sets come out in Japan first.
• OCG / TCG — For Yu-Gi-Oh!, the OCG is the Japanese and Asian version, the TCG the Western one. They have different card pools and banlists.
• Confirmed / reported date — On TCGKing, a date is "confirmed" when the publisher announces it, "reported" when it comes from a reliable unofficial source.

See these terms in action in our latest news or the release calendar.