Your Community is Not a Funnel
I spent the first stretch of my career in esports watching an entire industry get built on a bet that turned out to be only partly correct. The bet was that competitive gaming could be its own vertical — its own media business with its own leagues, franchises, and broadcast rights, all running parallel to the games themselves. Billions of dollars chased that bet. Most of it hasn't paid off, and a lot of ink has been spilled on why: bad unit economics, franchise fees nobody could recoup, an audience that would watch for free but wouldn't reliably pay. But of course, as a romantic who still believes there is life in the industry, I had to investigate why.
For years, gaming community strategy has largely been a conversation about platforms in singularity. Twitter became X; Discord became essential; TikTok changed discovery; Twitch turned players into broadcasters. Every shift came with the same question: where is the audience going next?
But something interesting is happening alongside all of that. Players are going somewhere we spent years assuming gaming was moving away from: the local game shop.
The enduring fandom of Warhammer, the resurgence of trading card games like Pokémon, the continued growth of Magic: The Gathering (MTG), and the emergence of new entrants like Riftbound point to something more complicated than a return to tabletop gaming. People aren't abandoning digital communities. They're using digital spaces to find their way into physical ones, and then bringing those physical experiences back online.
The community isn't the Discord. It isn't TikTok. It isn't the tournament or competitive league. The community is the relationship between all of them.
A community isn't found. It's given a reason to find itself.
Most community strategy still starts from a broadcasting mindset: find the audience, get in front of it, pump it with content and keep it engaged. That framing made sense when gaming culture lived primarily on a handful of platforms and the job was mostly one of reach. This doesn't hold up as well now, because the strongest gaming communities are rarely organized around a single channel, they're organized in an entire ecosystem.
This is a small distinction with large consequences. A channel is something a brand owns and an audience watches, but a community is something people build together, often despite the brand rather than because of it. The job of a community team isn't to keep people engaged with the brand. It's to create an environment where people become engaged with each other, and trust the brand enough to let it host that.
The best community strategy, in other words, makes the brand feel less like the moderator of the community and more like the town square in which the community exists.
The loop, not the funnel
Marketing has spent a decade thinking in funnels: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention. Gaming communities – especially physical ones – don't move in a line. They move in a loop.
Online: Creators post deck tech, pull videos, and discussion content. Discord servers argue about the new set. Discovery happens through algorithms and word of mouth.
IRL: That online interest sends people to a local store, a prerelease, a convention, a Friday-night meetup. They sit across a table from a stranger for the first time.
Back online: Players post their pulls, their decklists, their tournament results, their clips and stories from the table. The physical experience becomes digital content again — but this time it's theirs, not the brand's.
Back IRL: Those posts, rivalries, and inside jokes create reasons to come back next week. Friend groups form. Local identities form: "my store," "my playgroup," "my deck." The loop repeats, and each pass through it makes the community stickier than the last.
MTG has run this loop for three decades without ever publicly naming it. A new set drops, creators cover it online, players show up to prerelease weekend at their local store, and by Sunday night the same players are posting their results back into the same online spaces that sent them there in the first place. The loop is the product – the cardboard is just what the loop runs on. Or, as my friend and notable gaming figure Jonathon McDaniel once said: Cardboard is cheap, community is priceless.
What this means for a physical TCG entering the space today
A few trading card game (TCG for the uninitiated) isn't competing only for someone's screen time: it's competing for their Saturday afternoon, their local game store loyalty, their friend group, their creator subscriptions, their binder space, and – eventually – their sense of identity within a community. That's a much bigger ask than a follow or a watch-through, and it can't be won with a content calendar alone.
It changes what "creator strategy" actually means in this category. TCG audiences are especially skeptical of anything that looks like paid reach for its own sake, because the hobby runs on earned credibility – the deck tech creator whose picks actually win, the judge who explains a ruling correctly, the store owner whose Friday night event people trust enough to show up for weekly. The creators worth building around aren't necessarily the biggest ones, they're the ones already embedded in that trust network, the ones players would follow to a new game rather than just watch cover one.
And it changes what "measurement" means, too. Impressions and sign-ups tell you whether a launch was loud, but they don't tell you whether a community coalesced from it. The metrics that actually predict whether a new TCG survives its second year look more like: how many players showed up to week four of local play, not just week one; how many decklists and pull videos are being posted without any brand prompting; how many local stores have a regular, self-sustaining playgroup instead of a one-time launch event. Those are lagging indicators of something that can't be manufactured directly – they're evidence that the loop is running on its own.
The strategic bet
The interesting thing happening in tabletop gaming right now isn't that people are choosing physical play over digital community; it's that the two are just different stages in the same system, and the brands that understand this are building for the loop instead of the channel. They're treating local stores as community infrastructure rather than distribution points. They're signing creators for the trust they carry, not just the reach they have. They're measuring whether players come back to the table, not just whether they clicked through.
The future of gaming community isn't online or offline. It's the connective tissue between the two – and building that tissue, deliberately, is a very different job than running a content calendar. It's closer to urban planning than marketing: you're not building the audience, you're building the town square where the audience keeps finding each other.