by Doc – Owner, Founder, Not Paying Eighty Bucks for a Frickin ETB
Back in the day, amiibo prices were sky-high and Pokemon TCG prices were dirt cheap. The amiibo fans were sad, the Pokemon fans were happy, and the scalpers were focused on amiibo. Aside from Crown Zenith’s reprints, the first half of the Scarlet and Violet era didn’t have much interest from the fanbase so I could enjoy the objectively best Pokemon region’s cards (fight me) for discount prices. Then Pokemon 151 came out, followed by Paldean Fates a bit later. 151 was hard to get a hold of for a bit, and Fates was almost as difficult, but at the very least there was availability for a while.
Then all hell broke loose.
In October 2024 (for the USA, at least) Pokemon TCG Pocket and the Surging Sparks set released at the same time. Consumers loved TCG Pocket because it renewed their interest in buying the actual cards, and scalpers loved Surging Sparks because of the general consensus that “Pikachu = money” on TCG cards. Stellar Crown, the predecessor set, was the last ETB I was ever able to buy at MSRP, which was $45 if memory serves. Now the amiibo fans are happy, the Pokemon fans are sad, and the scalpers are focused on Pokemon. Everything since has looked like this:
Gee, okay, fine, I thought. Maybe I don’t need to buy an ETB anymore. I’ll just stick to getting booster packs occasionally! Surely there will be booster packs available that I can occasionally snatch up as a little adventure.
And I never saw a booster pack again. For several months straight, there wasn’t a single pack on the shelves anywhere in my area (which previously was extremely well-stocked due to the large college population here). I didn’t see Shrouded Fables, or Stellar Crown, or any of the sets that came after Surging Sparks. I never laid eyes on a Surging Sparks product until I happened to find myself in extreme rural Nebraska up near the South Dakota border a year after it released, and even then they wanted $8 for a Surging Sparks booster pack… at Dollar General. Every preorder I’ve seen, every store inventory, every single possible source of MSRP Pokemon cards has been instantaneously purchased by somebody else, presumably scalpers, before I’ve ever been able to see it. So I’ve given up buying Pokemon TCG products for almost a year now, as if I ever had the option in the first place.
I scream this into the void to say this: at what point does the regular consumer sit back, realize that spending this kind of money on trading cards is ridiculous, and say “Hey, who cares? Let’s spend this on something else, this is a lotta money”. I really figured this wouldn’t last for the 15 months it’s lasted, and that there’d be a crash by now. Maybe there will be. Maybe somebody is propping up these markets with a lot of the froth in the rest of the American economy stemming from the AI overinvestment, I don’t know. I’ve long suspected that America has developed a deep gambling addiction and that it’s really come to the forefront thanks to widespread legalization of sports gambling, and maybe that’s spilled over into Pokemon cards too.
Either way, this Pokemon TCG price bubble needs to pop, pop fast, and leave a ton of dirt cheap product on the market. I’m sick of this.
Amiibo Doctor 