He dreamed of pilot school, now earns millions on Pokémon cards

Roman Macalík once simply needed a side job to pay for his expensive civil aviation pilot training. Today he runs the Prague store Najáda, which sells collectible card games like Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering, and whose annual revenue has reached 250 million crowns.

Macalík studied at the Czech Technical University (ČVUT) while also training to become a pilot — an expensive pursuit that left little room for a conventional side job, given his packed schedule of classes and weekend flights. The solution was trading Magic: The Gathering cards, which he took up to cover part of his training costs. “I thought I’d quit after a couple of years and go fly. Instead, the guys from Najáda invited me in, and we struck a deal,” he recalls.

The decision proved fateful. The store that Macalík took over in 2017, after five years under its previous owners, had revenue of less than ten million crowns at the time. Today that figure has grown more than 25-fold.

“For the past ten years we’ve been growing steadily at 25% a year. Last year it was even 50%,” the entrepreneur says. According to him, the company is consistently profitable, which allows it to invest in growth: Najáda recently opened a store in Brno and is preparing to enter the Polish market, which, surprisingly, is less developed in this segment than the Czech one.

Growth potential, however, is limited not by demand but by supply. “We could sell several times more collectible cards alone. But even buying from distributors across Europe, we run into shortages on the market — the printing houses simply can’t keep up,” Macalík explains. Pokémon remains the top seller, followed by Magic: The Gathering, but cards based on the anime One Piece, Disney’s Lorcana and hockey cards are also gaining popularity.

About a third of the store’s revenue comes from selling individual cards: Najáda’s staff open random packs and sell the cards one by one, carefully calculating the odds of pulling rare specimens. The most expensive card ever sold was the legendary Black Lotus — five years ago a buyer paid a quarter of a million crowns for it, even though the rarest version in the world has fetched as much as three million dollars. Another third of turnover comes from sealed card packs, and the rest from board games and figurines, such as for Warhammer.