Agree with all of the above. I do think that while some people get in on the investment hype and think that Pokemon will be their retirement plan, others are just hoping that their purchases won’t drastically depreciate and if they ever did have to sell their collection in an emergency or if they lost in they could recoup a good percentage of the money they spent. Not sure which one OP is, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Predicting what will rise is imprecise, but predicting what will drastically depreciate is much easier. Here’s my list of things collectors shouldn’t buy if they’re looking to avoid losing money.
Don’t touch in-format, playable cards. Maybe Shaymin is your favorite Pokemon, and you loved the Roaring Skies full art. If you bought it in 2015-17, you’d be paying $60 a pop. It’s a $10 card in mint condition now. That means all the collectors paying $200+ for hyper rare Reshizard now are out of their minds. Unplayable stuff is a bit more stable, and may even increase over time if it’s a well-liked Pokemon. Stuff like Darkrai GX is $5-7 in full art right now, I doubt that it will ever go lower. Learning the TCG is a key asset for anyone collecting modern era cards (BW-on).
New sealed product (opening packs) is not worth it. It’s fun, but whenever you buy sealed product you should pretend you’re flushing that money down the toilet. You can buy singles with that money and it will not lose its value like opening sealed product will.
Avoid buying cards when they’re brand-new. That includes the first several PSA cards of a new set. There’s usually a fairly significant premium on the first cards, if there’s a card in a set you like then wait a few months before picking it up, the price will be more settled.
Be aware of artificial hype. This takes a lot of research and attuning yourself to the goings-on in the community, but it can be helpful. Everyone was hyping up no rarity in 2015, and look where we are now. Instagrammers were going crazy over PSA 10 Zard star, and those prices went haywire. Always keep in mind what you (or the community) knows and what they don’t know.
Even older, massively popular cards will go through cycles. Stuff like Charizard Gold Star in PSA 10 went from 2k in 2017 to 6k in 2018 to 4k today. Nothing is a perfect science, so you can’t expect everything to go up or stay where it is, regardless of when it’s printed. But lots of newer stuff, artificially hyped cards are ripe to be avoided.
Hyper Zard and Hyper Reshiram Zard embody the scarcity vs rarity argument.
10s of thousands of each will be printed, thousands are being graded. Nobody wants to sell them.
Unlike @fourthstartcg , I don’t think paying $200 for the raw cards is that unreasonable considering the sheer amount of product you need to go through to get one. The demand is there, these prices show us the strength of Pokemon as a brand and the collector hobby.
I believe Hyper Zard and ReshZard will drop in value simply because there’s just too many of them printed BUT I don’t think they’ll become crazy cheap. They might halve in value at most and it will take a few years before we see significant changes.
If they release a hyper rare Zard that has decent artwork as a chase secret that could change quicker. Both of ReshZard and Hyper Zard are ugly mofos.
Hyper ReshZard should never top more then $50. PikaRom is super playable and you can get Hyper copies of it anywhere between $30 and $50. ReshZard has the Zard premium, but this premium should not justify an additional $100-150.
In current day Pokemon, even the rarest pulls are maximum $50. And these $50 cards are only the playable cards (Full Art Trainers and Hyper Pokemon). Anything not in the playable-tier won’t and shouldn’t hit anything above $25.
While i agree the playability point, Charizard is the real deal for most collectors, i dont really care about having PSA10 copy of Pikarom; but that ReshiZard is beaty.
It isn’t available for under $800 in PSA 10 currently and has shown a strong 6-9 months in spite of it’s high pop. The pop seems to be plateauing too. Zard cannot be underestimated and I think this new hyper reshizard shouldn’t be either.
The issue with the new Reshizard is that it’s ridiculously playable, like best-deck-in-format hyped. That means that collectors that want it for PSA grading or otherwise have to compete with players who want it for their bling decks, resulting in higher prices. The Burning Shadows Zard doesn’t have that problem, so we can confidently say its prices aren’t going to tank when Burning Shadows rotates in a few months. Can we say the same for Reshizard in two years?
PSA graded copies lose all their value to players, which is why stuff like PSA graded Tapu Leles and Shaymins barely fetched any premium over the ungraded card. I think it’ll be very interesting to see how the prices on PSA Reshizards turn out.
A sealed box of Base 2 can now sell for $2000 USD. Even if you bought them at $100 each you now have 20x the initial investment.
Base 2 came out 7,423 days ago so you would have made at least 25 cents per day per box.
Bought 1000 boxes at $100 each?($100,000 worth of Base 2, you crazy mf) Congrats, you “made” $256/day.
If you’re just looking to make money, don’t invest in Pokémon cards. People are too short term and have want to doubt everything that isn’t a PSA 10, 1st base, skyridge or gold star.
All jokes aside, new bulk is where an increased print run would hit. 1 hyper or secret per box with this many possibilities is gonna keep their individual population under control. At the same time, that’s a ton of extra commons, uncommons, rares and holos per box printed.
@rattlebear, the population of modern cards is not under control. The cards are not investable.
People think they can just buy any random item and call it “investing” to justify their spending. I’ve done it before too. However, I would strongly encourage buying what you love, especially for new collectors. Once you’ve been engaged in the hobby (and watched all smapratte’s videos lol), then you can wander down the road of “investing”.
Set cards are not trophies, I know. I collect what I like and any growth is just a bonus and fun to follow.
I just think people overestimate the population and pull rate of any particular hyper or secret. Just because one is guaranteed in each booster box doesn’t make for a high population of each. When something only shows up 1 in 26 boxes, it’s definitely rare in terms of set cards. Was there ever a single card harder to pull than that?
Watch out for the false equivalence between rarity and scarcity. Just being hard to pull isn’t that much of a factor in and of itself, what matters is whether you can go on eBay and buy one right now. High print numbers contribute to this. Some quick (speculative) calculations:
Let’s take a card like FRLG Charizard. Interest in Pokemon was much lower at the time, but there were fewer chase cards in the set. There are 14 ex cards in the set, and let’s say you get 3 ex cards per box. On average, that’s a Charizard ex every 4.6 boxes. Let’s guess that Pokemon printed 200,000 FRLG boxes, for a grand total of 43,478 Charizard ex cards in total.
Now let’s compare it to Hyper Rare Reshizard. There are 26 hypers in the set, so assume 1 in 26 odds. Print numbers are much higher now and Unbroken Bonds is a massively playable set. Let’s say Pokemon has increased by tenfold in production and they print 2 million Unbroken Bonds boxes. That’s 76,923 hyper Reshizards.
Even though Reshizard is massively harder to pull, the high production numbers increase the availability. It’s certainly rare, but it’s not scarce.
Every set card ever released is currently available because of the internet.
Are there any leaked numbers or information that would indicate something like 10x more being printed in new sets? I don’t doubt that there’s more being printed I just think multiplying by 10 is too high of an estimate.
More boxes being sold just goes to show the health of the hobby. That’s a lot of people interested in pokémon cards.