Anti-Scalping Measures: Is This Too Far?

[koala]

The easiest solution combined is more supply and better pullrates. Chase cards are the core element of product desirability and alleviating the frustration of having to buy far more product to get cards you want by increasing pulls per product is a better strategy for long term satisfaction with collecting than… whatever is going on right now

[Dyl]

@eeveeteam

I may have been one of those calling for a junk wax era a year ago or so.

Three months feels so long nowadays.

Will the narrative on ultra modern ever change?

We are living in the junk wax era right now and no one knows it yet. What is driving modern demand? People seeing vintage go up in value over 20 years. People think that is repeatable with modern. But it’s not - everyone is a closet full of modern investor and everything is kept pristine. Vintage is valuable because it was played with and thrown out by our moms (or for me, my aunt). Pokemon is overprinting right now to keep up with this “demand” to fill the closets. The same thing happened with…

[pfm]

I have no idea what an E4 talking point is, I must have lost the official opinion manual at some point. But here’s a PFM talking point.

How are we not in a junk era right now? 90-95% of cards produced today have zero value. The literal blank cardstock sheets have more value than most of the cards printed on them today.

The only thing separating this current junk era from the infamous “junk wax era” is pull rate. It’s easy to look at the prices of the top 5 cards from each set and think what I’m saying is wrong, but those prices are extreme outliers and only sustainable because of 1 in 1000+ pack pull rates. If it weren’t for these ludicrous pull rates then we would be living in the equivalent of the junk wax era.

But think about it. Bulk has never been less valuable and between the SWSH and SV era, the number of packs you have to open to pull a worthwhile card has never really been so high. It’s all connected to scalping and supply issues too. If the vast majority of cards produced are just firestarter, then you have to buy way more product just to get an extremely small number of actually desirable cards. The actual value of the contents of a booster box is abysmal and it’s only boosted by the longshot odds that you pull some celestial Umbreon that can cover your rent. Under these conditions you basically have to clear the target shelf to even see anything worthwhile.

[tidaldreams]

is the junk wax era for sports cards from the 80s really comparable to whats going on in pokemon now tho? i would assume that era was considered junk because they overprinted massively and demand never kept up, which seems different than pokemans coz even though they are printing as much as they can it seems like they can never satisfy the demand

for it to become actual junk, the demand would have to tank in the future so that the cards would truly feel overprinted but with how popular pokemon has become i just dont see that happening

i am also pretty biased against sports cards and think all of it is junk because collecting video games growing up sports games were literally the most worthless things ever no one wanted them and you could get maybe 2 bux for them the year after they came out

[pfm]

@tidaldreams

would assume that era was considered junk because they overprinted massively and demand never kept up, which seems different than pokemans coz even though they are printing as much as they can it seems like they can never satisfy the demand

My understanding was that the junk wax era was actually hitting high prices on release but the prices ended up collapsing because the supply was ultimately too high.

The point I was making was that the supply dynamics are not much different from the junk wax era. The vast majority of cards printed today are fundamentally garbage. They only difference is that there is a small handful of cards with extraordinarily low pull rates that is effectively proping up the entire modern market. The ultimate irony being that we simultaneously have a “supply issue” that causes Costco fights while simultaneously the printers spend 98% of their runtime printing cards that are literally worthless.

[smpratte]

The sports junk wax era won’t ever replicate in Pokemon. There was a boom in the 80s, which spawned some of the standard outlets we have today; third party grading, auction houses, etc. This boom eventually signaled companies to print a ton of sports sets in a way they hadn’t prior. Before you just had your handful of rookie cards, sometimes only 1 card. After the 80s, companies started doing what we have today, all of these rookie variants. This created junk wax, ie. product that never had value. I remember when I got back into collecting, most-all 90s boxes were the same price or less than at release. That remained true for at least another decade.

What’s happening right now with pokemon can’t be described as junk wax, as new sealed product carries value, perhaps more than ever. The bigger issue, with sports, there were numerous companies printing numerous variants each year. The Pokemon tcg is and will most likely always be bottlenecked. Something like metazoo or other dead tcg’s are more comparable to junk wax, where sealed (wax) is lower than launch and has little to no organic demand.