The MetaZoo game came into the gaming community in 2020 as a unique trading card game (TCG). It offered an intriguing mixture of elements with references to folklore, paranormal activity, and, in particular, references to legendary animals and creatures.
These animals, known as Beasties, are the game stars and bestow the unique flavor that made MetaZoo a hit. In 2021, it was easily the TCG with the most buzz globally.
However, success proved fleeting for the game and its developers, MetaZoo Games LLC.
On January 29, 2024, the company announced it was shutting down operations.
The news caught fans and collectors unaware. How and why did this happen? We answer all your questions in our deep dive into why MetaZoo closed.
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Many games pit players against each other as they summon potent creatures in a battle of force. The most famous and enduring is Magic: The Gathering. However, the most successful in recent years, by a country mile, has been the Pokémon TCG.
MetaZoo builds knowingly on this tradition. However, it has some notable differences.
It allows factors from the real world to influence gameplay. The game’s creators refer to this as breaking the fourth wall. Here is a quote from the rulebook: “MetaZoo™ is a Collectible Card Game with groundbreaking mechanics that break the 4th Wall.
Choose where you play wisely because your surroundings dictate how powerful your cards are! Cast Water Spells when it’s raining to increase their effectiveness and partner with Dark Beasties during nighttime to augment their power. It’s not enough to build a powerful deck anymore; you might choose your Arena!
The creatures featured in MetaZoo have a particular flavor. They are cryptoids known as Beasties. A cryptid is an animal or creature that some believe exists, but no scientific proof exists. For example, Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster are some of the best-known cryptoids in world mythology.
Another element that made MetaZoo stand out from the competition was its integration into the online gamer community. By 2021, Discord had come to rule that particular word.
MetaZoo Games LLC was smart enough to harness this power, share its updates, promote itself, and receive feedback from players and collectors directly on the platform. Sadly, they also announced the game’s demise on their Discord server.
The MetaZoo game has been forgotten to some extent. That is undoubtedly a key reason MetaZoo Games LLC is closing.
But it was a runaway success from its roots in a 2020 Kickstarter campaign through the COVID-19-plagued year of 2021. After raising $18,249 in late 2020, the company went on an aggressive advertising campaign, which worked like a charm.
Indeed, there was so much excitement around this release that MetaZoo Games LLC purportedly met its funding goals in 15 seconds. Much of it is done by pumping up the hype through Discord and other forms of social media.
At the time, several articles were written praising the game format. As a result of all the hype, the value of the cards shot up. When Nightfall was released, all the stock of the boxes ran out immediately.
The hype surrounding it was not dissimilar to that weird Bored Ape Yacht club phenomenon that swept the World Wide Web at the time. However, this was arguably more justified since you did get a fantastic game out of it.
The MetaZoo game first broke into the TCG charts in August 2021.
The buzz attracted some massive names to the fold. Steve Aoki and Topps both announced partnerships with the now high-flying company.
And their ambitions did not stop there. According to the MetaZoo website, the following steps were: “to expand its line of available products with haste, and has ambitious but reachable goals for many, many years down the road, including, but not limited to a Netflix series, a movie, physical coin dispensaries, pre-built 4th wall game arenas, and so much more.” Unfortunately, it appears all those plans will remain on the drawing board.
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The announcement of the shutting down of the company came with this simple message:
MetaZoo Games Closure
With a heavy heart, I must announce that MetaZoo Games will close and shut down all operations immediately.
I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone in the community for the incredible 4-year run that we had. MetaZoo Games was started during the pandemic, provided a home, and created a culture that revitalized the TCG industry, launching a new wave of card games that now number in the hundreds. I’m proud to have been part of that, and you should be, too.
Unfortunately, that era has passed, and faced with logistical and product gridlocks, MetaZoo Games can no longer exist in the current economic and collectibles markets. I hope that MetaZoo can continue as an IP at some point in the future under new ownership, and I look forward to that day.
Special thanks to all MetaZoo artists and staff, both past and present, who made these past 4 years possible. The memories we create will be something we cherish for the rest of our lives.
More information will follow and be communicated via our discord channel when available.
Thanks for everything once again,
Michael Waddell
But how seriously should we take the reasons Wadell cites here?
The official announcement blamed “logistical and product gridlocks” for the closure of MetaZoo.
But this does not sound like a compelling explanation. If your profitable company is suffering from logistical and production issues, you resolve them and restructure. What you don’t do is shut down the cash cow. A significant loss of value must have preceded this move.
We have all seen MetaZoo lose a good amount of steam since 2021. At that time, they were usually in the top ten for TCG releases. In addition, MetaZoo boxes were selling for very high fees. By 2023, neither of those things were true.
Nonetheless, no one expected MetaZoo to disappear. Their Kuromi’s Cryptid Carnival Booster Box entered the TCG charts at number 15 in October 2023.
It enjoyed a price rise from $149.96 per sealed box at the start of October to $281.12 at its end. It was a solid performance that showed that the interest in the game, while lessening, did not disappear.
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However, there were some severe weaknesses to this game. As we have seen, there is a MetaZoo rulebook, and you can play the game. It’s even quite fun. I’ve had the pleasure of playing it.
But there were accusations from day one that this game was a scam perpetrated by so-called “crypto bros” to make a quick buck.
If you dare, return to those heady days of the COVID-19 shutdown. Everyone was bored, and we had too much cash, with the various stimulus checks landing in our accounts and nowhere to go out and spend it.
That led to money-guzzling fads in the collecting space and elsewhere. Regular people bought sourdough starter packs or took up crocheting. Meanwhile, traders bought stock in fad companies like Game Stop, AMC Entertainment Holdings, and Blackberry Limited.
Meanwhile, NFT first came to the fore in the collector’s space. People began investing massive amounts of money into weird things like the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
In the sports collectors world, people did equally odd stuff. They spent large sums on NFTs of NBA plays at Top Shot and in other sports-themed equivalents.
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Now that MetaZoo has become defunct, some observers do not seem surprised. Many have been saying since the early days of this game that it was not intended to be a long-term successful TCG game. Instead, the creators wanted to quickly get a lot of money from users before moving on to the next investment.
Whether the entire game was a scam or not is debatable. I would say probably not. The game was playable, and there were ongoing efforts to improve the gameplay. But there is no question that many involved were merely trying to make money off it. More so than in the more successful (and playable and original) TCG games.
It was also hard to avoid that many of the brand’s celebrity promoters had invested in the game. It created a sense that this was more about buzz than playability or community.
The MetaZoo creators did something that TCG card games do less of, which is to create rarity for some of the most important cards in the game.
Sports card producers have increasingly looked to create rare cards, with 1/1 releases or autos and refractors. Meanwhile, for TCG manufacturers, that is less practical. The cards are needed to play the game.
However, MetaZoo has issued many minimal cards to drive up value. Players have complained that this came at the expense of playability. They have done so with exceptional artists’ editions and 1/1s.
So, was MetaZoo a legit game or just a pump-and-dump scheme? Well, to the credit of this game, it did have all the main elements you expect from a TCG game. And to be honest, I have seen weaker structure among some more popular TCG games.
Let’s start with the basics. Any successful TCG game needs a solid narrative to pull the game together. For MetaZoo, that was the story of the great caster Sam Sinclair.
The tales of his adventures and the shape of the universe within which MetaZoo was created are told in a series of chapters published by the company. You can read them here.
The basic idea is that a Great Veil was placed to hide magic from our world over 1000 years ago. Because of this, all the magic creatures and items become the subject of legends and folklore.
But now, you guessed it, that veil has shattered, leaving the world open to the reemergence of magic.
But worry not; with the proper training, you can control the magical creatures and abilities that now run wild. The game casts players as a caster, a commander of beasties, and magic wielders.
As a result of lifting the Great Veil, we had all sorts of creatures reenter our lives. The powerful Mothman. Or perhaps you prefer the legendary Bigfoot, arguably the most famous of the cryptids, and Bigfoot cards offer physical solid attacks and high-life points. And there are other beautiful cryptoids like Chupacabra and the Jersey Devil.
Much like in Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon, the creatures you summon have stats that determine their abilities. They include the life points, attack strength, and the unique skills each incredible animal offers.
As you would expect from a magical game like MetaZoo, artifacts are also involved. They have a more permanent effect than other cards and can strengthen the player’s cryptoids or weaken those of your rival. You also can wield spells or potions,
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We are not going to reproduce the entire rulebook here. But here are the basics of the game. You need to reduce the life force of your opponent from 1,000 down to zero to defeat them.
You are correct if all this sounds very similar to Magic: The Gathering and the Pokémon TC. That is a criticism that has plagued the game from day one.
Like most TCG games, you build a deck called a spellbook in the rules here. To use spells and creatures, you need auras. These serve a similar role to mana in Magic: The Gathering.
As is often the case, you must find a balance between the attacking cards (the cryptoids and the like) and those that provide staying power, like the auras.
So, much as in Magic, you needed to maintain a strong “mana curve,” you have to do the same here with auras. A great cryptoid is pointless if you can’t use the appropriate atmospheres.
There are four main phases:
As we noted, what made this game unique was how it brought the real world into the game. It did so by bringing weather and conditions in the room into the game.
But over time, MetaZoo also started to get an increased number of items, which could, under certain circumstances, have in-game effects.
Here is the complete list of things you can use in real life (as in breaking the fourth wall) in the MetaZoo game:
While the use of real-life elements in the game can be fun and exciting, there have been long-standing complaints that they render MetaZoo unplayable. To these critics, the meta-gaming parts of MetaZoo (what the game’s creators call breaking the fourth wall) are a ridiculous way to try and set the game apart.
They note that some rules, like if you scream loud enough to shut down the game, you automatically win, are not practical.
Others have said that the match steals too many mechanics from Magic: The Gathering and much of its aesthetics from the Pokémon TCG. The implication is that this is a shoddily designed game meant to make a quick buck.
With MetaZoo failing after a few years, there are lots of things you can point to why the trading card game failed.
But perhaps the most significant phenomenon of the period was the cryptocurrency investment. The obsession with this currency spawned the prototype of the much-maligned “crypto bro.”
These annoying people invest heavily in cryptocurrency and similar assets and hype them on social media with obnoxious memes. No one likes them, and the tanking of their investments has brought joy to many un-empathetic (or simply human) observers.
The central phenomenon that emerged in the TCG world in this strange period was MetaZoo. The value of boxes of these cards was inflated, just like those of Top Shot and Bored Ape Yacht Club.
They used Discord and social media in a way that was highly reminiscent of the way “crypto bros” operated. Indeed, many of those same people were involved in inflating the prices of Meta Zoo boxes.
In particular, DJ Steve Aoki was heavily involved and came on as a primary equity partner. Aoki has long been, and to an extent continues to be, the celebrity face of the “crypto bro” world.
It seemed that few people were investing in MetaZoo for any reason other than immediate profit. Very few seemed to be doing it just for fun. But we will get back to that issue.
At first, most of us saw the crypto bros phenomenon as annoying. But as big money became involved, we saw a turn for the worse in that space toward outright criminality.
The best-known case of this trend was the conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried for fraud. This individual was the founder of the FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange which dominated the crypt scene at one point.
At the peak of his success, Forbes ranked Bankman-Fried as the 41st richest person in the United States. Therefore, he became the poster boy for the cryptocurrency community.
Thus, when he was found guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, it was a seismic event for that space, exposing many unethical and illegal cryptocurrency practices.
Several examples of MetaZoo’s shady business practices have come to light.
MetaZoo has been accused of following its own set of ethically problematic standards. The first scandal involved the banning and silencing of any criticism of MetaZoo on its Discord channels.
The company prides itself on having a thriving community and taking the feedback of its members into account. Therefore, this was particularly jarring to the people involved.
Users reported being banned for the dumbest “infractions” imaginable, from posting a poop emoji to liking a meme that was critical of the MetaZoo game.
Let me say that banning the poop emoji, without a doubt, undermines the entire ecosystem of the internet. I said what I said. But some people were even banned for liking posts critical of MetaZoo Games LLC on other social media platforms.
Things got so bad that MetaZoo decided in November 2022 to unban everyone from their channel.
They released a message saying, “We will unban everyone who has ever been banned from Discord. As we roll out the new IP, let this be a time of healing and friendship.”
But the damage had been done. It destroyed the sense of community which is so essential for maintaining this platform.
When people buy into a game, especially one as expensive as MetaZoo, they aren’t just paying for the playing experience. They also are searching for a sense of community. To many, that is more important than gameplay. The banning soured many gamers on the occasion.
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Another problem with their communication with players and fans was their official website. Compare the official website of MetaZoo to that of Pokemon.com or Magic: The Gathering, and you will see the difference.
The amount of money invested in design was minimal. Sure, they relied primarily on Discord rather than a website. But websites are a much better forum to store permanent data, like rules and tournament info.
Furthermore, they banned so many people from their discord servers that having a website to access all necessary data proved essential. It was just another symptom of their weak outreach to fans. All Metazoo seemed to care about was investors.
Despite never catching on quite the way the biggest TCGs did, MetaZoo ran several annual tournaments. One was the Dark Tower tournament held in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. One hundred seventy-seven players participated in the game, and the winner was Nicholas Blandin.
An Instagram Post released by MetaZoo celebrated the event. It read: “Everyone, please congratulate our first-ever MetaZoo Dark Tower Caster: Nicholas Blandin! Overcoming every obstacle and overwhelming Point Pleasant in darkness, Nicholas has been crowned MetaZoo’s master of Dark Beasties!
A big congratulations to Fredrick Chang, coming in 2nd, and Ken Adams, coming in 3rd, and to everyone who participated!”
The prizes from the tournament were pretty significant. The first-place winner, Blandin, was supposed to receive $20,000, the second-place winner got a $10,000 reward, and the third got a nifty fiver.
But months later, the winnings from the tournament had still not been paid out. $50,000 in cash and $75,000 in store credit were never delivered. This comes from a lack of liquidity for the company.
However, that was not the full extent of the problem. Many others had not been paid by MetaZoo as well. Artists who had won competitions to draw cards for the company complained they did not receive any money.
Worse yet, MetaZoo started to ban anyone on Discord who mentioned this problem. That was particularly annoying to followers because the company had reversed all bans previously and promised a new era of community. But that new era never came.
Furthermore, throughout 2023, the value of products kept dropping. The popularity was simply not as high as it had been. But MetaZoo was still supplying boxes at high prices to distributors.
Therefore, many products were sold at a loss. For example, the MetaZoo x Sanrio Exclusive Collector Bundle: Two booster boxes were originally slated to sell for $300. Then the price dropped to $150 even before the release. Which puzzled everyone. But not long after that, the price fell to 75$.
That does not encourage suppliers to order more new products. Worse yet, some suppliers were not being paid by the company and complained about debts. That occurred with increasing frequency as cash flow became a problem.
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MetaZoo and its supporters were very excited about 2023 and published a roadmap of the releases they had planned for the year.
They had releases and major events planned for nearly every month of the year. But soon, many of these were significantly delayed. Others were canceled with notice, and others without.
As one MetaZoo content creator said, this was done without explanation or apology. If you want us to create content for you, how can we create content when we can’t reliably provide accurate information? Everything is overpromised and underdelivered. And I think this is why MetaZoo content creators are dwindling off.”
MetaZoo faced the same problems with value that many NFTs did after the collapse of the COVID-19 bubble. The deal collapsed, and interest plummeted because it wasn’t clear what MetaZoo brought.
Think of the most popular collectibles in the hobby. Sports cards and Pokémon TCG cards. Both are based on the pop culture visibility and popularity of the franchises they represent.
Millions of people watch the NBA, NFL, and MLB. The Pokémon franchise is a media empire made up of video games, a hit animated series, and films, aside from the very popular TCG.
New famous actors in the TCG space, such as Disney Lorcana, also bring a commercially viable world of content into the mix. Meanwhile, Magic: The Gathering has based its value and popularity on playability. The worthwhile cards there tend to have the most effective in-game impact.
Another element that brings value to the brands above is the nostalgia from collecting these cards as a kid. Or, in the case of Disney Lorcana, from watching the relevant cartoons and movies at a young age.
That is the sort of thing you build organically by making cards available to young collectors at low prices. That will never happen by marketing expensive boxes and cards to other crypto bros.
But MetaZoo doesn’t bring any of that underlying recognition or value to the table. The cryptoid idea is very excellent. It’s legit. But that is not a recognizable brand.
Meanwhile, the playability of MetaZoo has been described by many critics as suspect. As a result, they never developed the kind of player base that other games did.
Another reason MetaZoo didn’t take off among actual TCG players is that it is too expensive.
You have to differentiate between the crypto bro types specializing in creating disposable income and the players who show up at gaming stores to play.
Many are students or work part-time and play these games as a hobby. They did not have the money to spend thousands of dollars on a MetaZoo box at the bubble’s peak.
The result of all these issues was that few people collected MetaZoo because they liked the concept and the artwork. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of excellent elements behind that.
But they tended to get lost behind the buzz and the idea that there was investment value to be had. Genuine collector interest is more challenging and requires a long game based on playability and community. MetaZoo did not provide that atmosphere.
Instead of patiently fostering that atmosphere, MetaZoo kept printing cards that would have value. Even if that was temporary, the special edition and 1/1 cards that created buzz at first were worth very little — because there were too many of them, and they didn’t mean anything in the game.
Of course, increasingly, the game meant less as well. This self-perpetuating cycle drove value and interest down over the long run.
MetaZoo was going for ridiculous prices during the height of the COVID-19 era. Here are the top-valued cards from the game in 2021:
These are solid numbers. But what are MetaZoo cards going for right now?
I looked at the most significant MetaZoo sales of the last three months to see how the market has changed. The highest sale was remarkably impressive. It was a $17,500 Mothman Sample card, graded a CGC 10.
While that probably would have gone for far more in 2021, that is still a nice chunk of change. But there were no other sales at that level. Nonetheless, some others had a good value as well.
A 2022 Topps Chrome 1/1 Mothman superfractor sold for $3,305. This shows us that the market for MetaZoo was well past its peak by early 2023. But still quite significant.
There are still listings on eBay demanding insane prices for MetaZoo boxes and cards. For example, someone is trying to sell a MetaZoo Sample Mothman Collect-A-Con stamped MINT PSA 9 1/1 card for $120,000.
But that is a remanent of another time. The cuts in price for most MetaZoo cards are pretty apparent. So far, value loss has been about 40-50% for most cards. And there is no reason to believe it will stop there.
Perhaps most tragically, someone has a listing up saying, “Lot Of All My Metazoo! Thousands Spent! Take My Loss :)” It is currently up for $1,500. I have a feeling the seller will have to adjust the price downward to finalize the sale.
The underlying lack of community and player loyalty likely means MetaZoo will likely not have long-term value.
Strong card prices are, to a great degree, inspired by nostalgia. We long for our childhood and collect cards that remind us of that.
Mickey Mantle cards have value because they symbolize a lost time and place. But how many people will remain nostalgic for what many perceive as a crypto bro pump-and-dump scheme?
I have played MetaZoo and am familiar with its gameplay and lore. The mechanics were not always smooth, and there were issues involved. However, that is to be expected with a relatively new game.
Overall, the game was fun and had plenty of potential. That was never the problem. MetaZoo was a real game, and that is why its tournaments were pretty popular, and it carved out a niche in the TCG community.
Other problems spelled the demise of the game. While not a pump-and-dump scheme, the MetaZoo Games LLC was too heavily focused on providing value to investors and partners.
Meanwhile, it did not show the patience to build grassroots support. The company failed to do even the most essential things required to achieve that goal, like maintaining a functioning community on Discord and paying tournament winners.
The way the company announced it was folding betrayed a lack of effort. Michael Waddell said that logistic problems prevented the game from continuing. But those are issues everyone in the hobby (and elsewhere) faced during COVID-19 and beyond.
But Topps, Pokemon, and others overcame them through grit and effort. MetaZoo proved unwilling to do so, which is a pattern in their behavior.
But perhaps its most significant problem was unavoidable and structural. MetaZoo did not bring much real value to the table. MetaZoo was not based on characters or a world that was familiar to fans and evoked feelings of nostalgia.
That was always a challenge that needed to be overcome. But the mechanics and playability of MetaZoo were never strong enough to do so.
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