I was just kind of thinking last night, and ive been a chef my whole adult life. Out of curiosity, how would one go about getting a career in the pokemon card field? What kind of options are out their besides working for a card shop? Im looking for more like behind the scenes work, using and gaining knowledge. Would someone with only a high school diploma and being 31 (could be ANYBODY) have any attainable options?
Depends on what kind of career you’re looking for. Many people here have built small businesses from the ground up buying and selling cards, whether that’s doing singles on eBay/TCGPlayer, buying raw cards and grading, flipping collections, or all of the above and more. But that’s a very competitive field, so it may be challenging to break in.
You could work for a card shop or someone else’s small business, which is probably easier but likely won’t pay you very well. Pokemon themselves occasional hires people, although working behind the scenes might not be as rewarding, and you’d probably need to move to Washington state.
The good thing is that probably none of these jobs require any advanced education.
I work for one of the leading auction houses as a TCG expert. Although it might be difficult to find a good auction house for TCG in ones country if they live outside of the USA.
To piggyback off your reply here: if you’d like work FOR Pokemon, you’ll also likely need to know (or be in the process of learning) Japanese. I know Nintendo prefers their global employees know the language.
Im in the US. And @fourthstartcg i guess im thinking more along the lines of @renato comment, like how does one even get a foot in the door? And i honestly dont think this will go anywhere im just more so thinking what if
Also the only reason i wont consider a shop or being retail myself is because i am not good with people. I would very much prefer hiding in an office somewhere quietly writing stuff down.
Make sure that you can demonstrate your knowledge, ability, reach and network within the Trading Card Games. Other than that be honest and make no compromise on integrity, ever.
As an employee: Apply and talk to companies in the field. Auction companies, authenticators, corporation marketing, product research, or whatever else.
As selfemployed: Start a company, be really good at networking and selling your skills, back that up with actual skills, convince other people you are as good or better than what you say, work for reasonable prices until people in the field know your name as an expert.
My recommendation would be to work part-time for a card shop or game store, even if it sounds anxiety-producing. This will help you to build your knowledge and to work on necessary people skills. It will also improve your networking ability and may open other doors in the TCG world.
Most TCG-adjacent careers do not require much higher education, but they do require a vast knowledge base and some level of social skills.
A final point is that jobs that stem from hobbies may negatively impact your enjoyment of the hobby. People say “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” but it’s not exactly true. Every job has its unique stressors and hobbies that turn into jobs are no different.
Working in this industry is entirely about experience. I would caution that it is work. The enjoyment you have right now might be because its not work.
One other aspect is things can be volatile. I know guys who bounced from auction houses multiple times in one year. This is such a demand driven industry, which can make a career path more like platform peril. Anyway I think those are the two big ones. There are plenty of people who find the balance and enjoy their hobby job!
A lot of people I know who decided to turn it into a business had to completely forfeit their PC to fund the business. So keep that in mind too
Career In pokemon? Either LGS Owner/employee, auction house employee, Poketuber, Possibly tour hoser (Can someone Clarify) Possibly Competitive player (Again can someone clarify, iirc they dont make alot of money, i dont make anything since i dont play vgc)
Cheers!
High quality TCG/VGC content (both written and video) is what Id consider. Deep dives into card releases, vgc tournament pivotal plays, etc. Just like TheFineCard and WolfeGlicke on YT/IG, those guys are few and far between with their caliber of stuff.
Something that will sharpen your skills because lets face it, the labor intensive buying/pregrading/grading/selling saga does little more than teach you basic business practices. LGS would be the last thing Id personally do
Please do not quit your current career to work 30c/hr for the Zucc
I honestly do think it’s one of the least saturated niches in the space that has a strong success rate if the content is good enough
I have no intention of leaving what i do now. I truly love cooking and will continue to do so. I was just thinking about the “what couldve been” and then i went further down the rabbit hole. As someone with no connections and in a small area i was really interested in how one would even start that process on the more professional side.
You’d have to invest countless hours before making even $1. You have to pay for a good video setup for youtube, maybe a photoshop subscription for instagram. For either, there are prerequisite skills you also would need to develop assuming you don’t have them. Good graphic design/writing skills. How to act in front of a camera, edit videos. Then you need to grind it out for months or years following news, researching content, creating content at a steady pace, learning how to game the algorithm.
You’d probably need to spend a minimum of $50,000 in opportunity cost building the skills and content needed - and all this relies on an assumption that there’s a large enough audience for your content in the first place. Even after you get your 10k followers or 30k subscribers, you are still making probably less than a McDonald’s employee per hour. Just ask @smpratte how much he’d make if he didn’t have a very lucrative Patreon alongside his channel.
I would say the success rate is also extremely low. For every 1 @chok or 1 pokerev you have some large unknown number of other people trying to do the same thing but failing. Because of the way content is algorithmically shown, you and I and everyone else almost exclusively just see the success stories. But they are the exception, not the rule.
Pfm is spot on! If you go the entrepreneur route its a constant grind. If I didn’t have patreon I would have stopped doing videos years ago. I barely have enough time and mental energy to do public videos even with patreon. It can’t be overstated how much increased exposure takes from your life. If you aren’t making a substantial living its not worth it. Even if you are, I’m still not sure if its worth it.
He’s checking to see if you put in your daily 1-4 hour shift on instagram