Card value is an imaginary medium for negotiating social value, not real use-value.

Evidence

The value of Pokémon cards is clearly imaginary. Even in their initial, commodified form, a slip of mass-produced, coloured cardboard is by no stretch of the imagination “worth” the money children wish to pay for them. Within most economistic analyzes, and many Marxist ones, it would simply be assumed that the “use-value” of the cards is worth the extra price, and that this “use” is basically enjoyment or distraction (whether interpreted positively or negatively). But the “use-value” of the cards is really the way they serve as a medium for the negotiation of value, which is highly imaginative, remarkably collaborative (if sometimes coercive) and largely autonomous. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 379

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the fictive capital/financialization frame — imaginary value that structures real social relations. Would connect to deWaard’s argument about finance colonizing everyday imagination.
• DEFINE: Clarifies how ‘use-value’ gets redefined in financialized childhood: as a medium for value negotiation rather than utility.
• ADDENDUM: Rounds out the ‘grafting and growth’ theme only tenuously, but this imaginary-value negotiation echoes the speculative value logic underpinning the financialization argument elsewhere.