by Doc – Owner, Founder, STOP SPENDING THIS KIND OF MONEY ON POKEMON CARDS
All right, gather round. We’re going to have a family discussion.
Do you see this? This is not okay.
I just got an email from GameStop telling me about how their repackaged cards thing, called PowerPlay, has a new option. There is now a $5,000 tier. That’s right — for the low, low price of five grand, you can open a pack of repackaged Pokémon cards digitally, trusting that not only will you eventually be able to have possessory rights over it, but also that it actually is worth the value that GameStop says it’s worth. This card — this Pokémon card, which derives no practical value aside from what somebody else will say it’s worth — might maybe be yours. And if you’re lucky, there’s a one-in-four chance that the value of the cards you pull will be greater than the cost of the repackaged booster pack you just opened. Hooray for you! There’s only a 75% chance that you just flushed a sizeable portion of five G’s.
Just to be clear — I don’t think GameStop is lying about the card values, or otherwise committing some kind of fraud here. I’d assume they’re above board with this. I’m saying it doesn’t matter whether they’re legitimate or not; this is a grift. There’s already an extreme gambling problem flushing out the addicts across the United States — otherwise sports betting, Polymarket, and Pokémon cards would be much smaller activities than they currently are. But this? This is absurd. This is taking advantage of the psychological flaw in our sense of prediction and perception to make people feel like this is a good idea. It’s no different than putting your retirement savings into the slot machine.
Might I remind you that the Pokémon card market has come and gone before, and cards that used to be worth thousands of dollars are now worth hundreds. And, unlike something like the American stock market, many of them did not regain their former value. If you put five grand into your 401(k), and the stock market takes a dive, you’ll eventually get the value of your money back thanks to the relative consistency and stability of that system. But as for Pokémon cards, that money will dry up once the handful of extremely liquid young tech guys who are flooding money into the market run out of money — and we don’t know when that will be. In other words, if you blow five grand on this, you could lose everything at any moment, and frankly — you would deserve it.
When I started collecting Pokemon cards four years ago, every booster pack on the market save for Crown Zenith was selling for MSRP, everywhere, all the time, and you could still find Crown Zenith in a few stores without difficulty. The market was “down” and there had never been a pattern of consistency where the market was “up”, either. Still hasn’t been. This was right before the AI bubble started to swell up, and before the tech bros were flushed with extra cash again. Once the AI bubble pops… what do you think happens to their card collections? They sell them to make good on their overleveraged stock market portfolios. Supply explodes in the market, the number of high-dollar consumers drops, and the Pokemon market crashes too.
Look, I understand the excitement of opening booster packs for money. I didn’t make a ton of TCG Card Shop Simulator guides on this website because I think it’s a dumb activity. But man, you really need something better to spend your money on than trading cardboard.
Amiibo Doctor 