This generation is overwhelmed.

People are truly rabid for Pokémon cards. A similar thing happened with a Pikachu card at the Van Gogh museum; people just repeatedly entered to get the card, skipping the museum part entirely.

I don’t even think the actual players/collectors are rabid, it seems more like the scalping has collapsed into some self sustaining dystopian nightmare

It’s exactly this. A normal person would get their card and eat the food. People doing this are just shit people

The same people have moved over to other things like MTG and Warhammer, you are lucky now to get limited release stuff and its all over ebay for double or triple the value.

Scalping has taken over pretty much each release based hobby for the last half decade, its insufferable.

because people keep paying for that shit….. the scalpers that can play the long game will always win with these kind of things, the only way to get rid of it is killing the resale market by changing the business model to print on demand for EVERYTHING. but that will never ever happen, since that makes all those cards worthless outside of playing with them. MTG/hasbro/WOTC claim they never look at the second hand market but somehow the high priced rares hardly get reprints while they reprint the bulk… so they defo take it into account.

Secret lair for magic is a prime example of this. They were print to demand with a pretty long production window (which they were explicitly up front with) and then changed it right before the princess bride collab citing something about how people didn’t like how long it took to get product. Yet nowhere you looked were people actually complaining about how long it took for things to get delivered outside one or two people. Yet since then we’ve seen prices skyrocket and collabs go through the roof.

I’ve long said that the best solution for customers AND Wizards/Hasbro is: 1) Pre-print a certain number and sell those as the first batch 2) If orders exceed the number of pre-printed cards, print-to-order any additional orders 3) Do not under any circumstances do anything different to the first print run vs the second that would indicate in any way that the pre-printed and print-to-order cards are in any way different If you don’t sell out of the pre-printed ones, you just keep them up till they sell. If you do sell out, printing to order is literally just printing money.

because “the number always has to go up”. and hasbro hardly has any other profitable IP’s so might as well RUN THIS ONE INTO THE GROUND. fuck this form of capitalism.

I’ve started just doing proxies for stuff I don’t pull. I care about the game not the cards.

Are there even regular people buying it or is it just a cycle of scalpers selling to scalpers who think the value will eventually be higher than what they bought it at? There’s always bagholders with these things.

These aren’t stocks. They’re not specifically an investment vehicle. There’s an end user that wants the cards for their actual play or collection value. The problem is how many hands the cards are starting to go through before they get to that user. The problem with cards is they aren’t like concert tickets or PS5s. There isn’t an expiration on their value or usefulness and there is a limited print cycle, so even if a scalper can’t make a quick turn, they can hold and hope the value goes up (which it almost always does for sealed product).

Nah, scalping has been a thing for much longer than that. It’s just that it keeps getting worse every year. I still remember having to buy a Wii, and a PS3 on eBay from a scalper, because there was no other way to get one at the time. Hell, when I worked at GameStop, one of my managers would take 20 buck to put people on a “Wii waiting list”. Then someone would call them when they got a shipment in

> Nah, scalping has been a thing for much longer than that. I didn’t say that scalping didn’t exist, I said that it has noticeably taken over every single hobby in the last few years (or at least the ones that consist of buying items on the primary/secondary market). Some hobbies were relatively scalper free, this is no longer the case, and some always had a ton of them. Coming with specific older examples isn’t contrary to what I’m saying, although you’re welcome to disagree with me.

I completely stopped caring about new MTG releases because between absurd power creep and scalping, it just seemed like every new one made keeping up with the game feel worse.

> you are kuvky now umm what?

Lucky

and wotc plays into the shit with the fortnitification with the whole secret lair stuff, then the collector boosters that get really expensive.

The worst part is that Hasbro is setting up MTG for exactly that. Look at the recent MtG and Final Fantasy collab. There were specific collectors edition packs that had different cards. Before Hasbro made a billion pop culture crossovers for MtG, it was an expensive, yet still affordable hobby. I genuinely feel bad for anyone new who wants to try out Magic or Pokemon cards.

> There were specific collectors edition packs that had different cards. They’ve been doing collectors editions for a bit now. It didn’t start with FF. And it’s only the artwork that is different, all cards are still obtainable through regular packs, you just don’t get the fancy artworks there, so it doesn’t increase the price of the game itself.

The pokémon card scene is the most inflated, not-real market I’ve ever seen. Beyond the scalping, there’s also an ungodly amount of Chinese fakes now too. For all you can criticize about it, at least the $200 pokémon games make sense compared to these cars prices nowadays.

$200 Pokemon games? Do I need to go find my old pokemon Gameboy carts? Also for people who grew up with Pokemon cards, it’s worth taking a look through them now. I liked Charizard as a kid, turns out the 4 Charizard cards I had are worth about 2k USD.

As a collector i am lucky to find a few packs when i do my grocery shopping. Alot of places got the pokemon vending machine that disperse product in increments and people have started to camp the machine waiting for the product to become available for purchase.

I pulled something like 200 cards off ebay and tcgplayer because all my sales for almost a year were to dick scalpers that would straight up neg my collection then repost marked up 25-50% Unfortunately I had been layed off and mortgage payments backed up to where I was concerned I could lose my house. Afyer I found a new job, the day of my first check i said no more. I’ll give those cards away for Halloween or actually be played with by my kids, heck maybe myself again before I help fuel this nonsense. I havent seen an actual pokemon tcg booster in the wild in several months between target/walmart/dollar general. 9n the bright side digimon seems to have “filled in” a bit and that was always my favorite anyway.

Years ago I worked at a bookstore and we would get more promotional cards than we would give out. I’d just take them and resell them on ebay for a couple bucks each.

I remember when the very first Pokémon movie came out, you’d get a Mewtwo card for free when you bought a ticket. Imagine doing that today …

Ended uo with 2 because I got 1 for my birthday and a person sold us a bunch if vhs tapes, their copy still had the card inside the case.

I worked at a movie theater during that time, we ended up with boxes of them left over. Used to play a game where we’d bend em and then trying get them stuck in the glass of the pinball machine from the counter.

There were scammers and scalpers even then. I remember in the theater there was a guy who came up to my family begging for a card because “they ran out” and “he didn’t get one” and “he was going to give it to his kid”. Since my whole family was there and we had 4 cards, my sister and mother guilted me into giving up one of them. Looking back, pretty obvious he was a scammer trying to score extra cards from gullible people.

And the Unknown cards! Cant remember which movie it was from, though. Was it the Entei-as-a-villain one?