Trading cards have become a big deal lately, particularly in games like Lorcana, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Digimon. Upper Deck, perhaps the premiere trading card company, is bringing its A-game to San Diego – and X-Men ’97 was a huge part of those plans. Not only did Upper Deck have an exclusive pack of X-Men ’97 cards, but it even had a pair of prints replicating the ’90s era of X-Men thanks to artist Elizabeth Torque. If that wasn’t cool enough, on Friday Upper Deck scheduled a signing event with Whilce Portacio, who co-created Bishop. I spoke to senior brand manager Travis Rhea about Upper Deck’s plans for the future, including the deal it signed with DC Comics.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
AIPT: What can you tell us about what Upper Deck is bringing to SDCC this year?
Travis Rhea: Oh, big year for us this year. We’ve got a lot of cool exclusives on the Marvel side, but we also have a lot of other licensed products this year. The booth is always a challenge because we have so many different awesome licenses…it’s a challenge to figure out what we’re gonna put on the booth each year. You’re gonna find a lot of different things this year. The main push this year was X-Men ’97 stuff; we have some trading card packs and gallery prints that we made just for the show and they’ve been very popular. We also brought some of our games, people don’t know we make games.
AIPT: Oh! What kind of games do you make?
TR: As you might imagine it’s card-based, mostly, because that’s our bread and butter. Our flagship game that has been on the market since 2012 is a game called Legendary that’s a Deck building card game. It’s seen some different iterations over the years…the first one was Marvel and it’s one of the top rated deck building card games on the market. It’s become evergreen. It’s out there doing its thing and we’ve done our best to support it. I think there’s almost upward of 40 different expansions that we’ve put out at this point.
This year we got back into the TCG business. I don’t know if you know this but Upper Deck was the company that popularized Yu-Gi-Oh in this country, we did Yu-Gi-Oh for years and years. During that we also did some Blizzard TCG, we did a VS TCG that had Marvel and DC, so we’ve had a lot of experience in it. But then we stopped it for a while…this year we’re returning to the TCG space with a game based on Neopets. We launched that last month.
AIPT: How do you guys pick and choose what franchises to make into cards?
TR: Some stuff is like an obvious fit for us…when we see something like James Bond it’s a match. Some of them are passion projects…our team really loves video games and we’ve been diving into the video game space. We did Overwatch League when they were around, we did Call of Duty league, we’re really all over the entertainment space. We’ve really diversified.
You may have noticed our recent announcement about DC…we’re really excited about that on multiple levels. This is a company that knows superheroes really well and internally we’re very passionate about DC so we can’t wait to get started on that. There are a few things that may be a little too edgy for Upper Deck and we try to stray away but then again we’re not afraid of it either. Like we made some product for The Boys which could also be considered a little edgy.
AIPT: Any dream licenses?
TR: DC was on the list…we have a relationship with Warner Brothers and we were able to make that happen. There are other big franchises that we’d like to get our hands on someday, just really any of those that’ve been long enough to be nostalgic but remain relevant. For example, we did Alien stuff and that’s one of the more popular games we made because it’s so nostalgic. Things of that nature.
AIPT: The TCG space is heating up in recent years. Do you think Upper Deck will take advantage of that?
TR: Actually, we’ve seen that coming for the last five years, so we’ve started to shift internally and develop a few things. We’ve had multiple TCG’s in development for the past few years. The short answer is yes, we do see opportunity there.
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