Just for fun discussion:
I’m curious your opinions on the Pokemon tcg market version of the ages old debate; did the chicken or the egg come first?
What sets the market value? Sealed product or the cards themselves?
For example:
Does the value of a booster box rise or lower based on the current prices of the cards or do the values of the cards rise or lower based on the current price of the box?
If this has been discussed, I’m sorry. My searching skills have failed me.
Have a good day!
The value of a box is based on the potential value of the contents obtained from opening. Not including the overly printed Nintendo era boxes.
I think it isn’t really one or the other, and it also depends on age/scarcity. For example with Base 1st ed, I think the jump in price on most of the high grades was due to the most recent sale of a booster box reaching $50,000+. But it could easily be the other way for old sets depending on which sells for a higher premium first(the card or the box). Thinking of it from an overall perspective, if a box has 1 chase card such as burning shadows with the charizard, that may be the saving grace for prices on that box in the future. But yeah, as PokemonRadar said, its all based upon potential values.
I’d love to hear input on this as well!
I’d imagine it would work something like this: If you buy a box of cards and the worst possible pulls you could get had a market value of $5 the very next day, then you wouldn’t see a box lower than $5 on the market. Right? But what would dictate the market value/demand of that box? I’d imagine that would be the average to highest potential value of pulls from the same box.
So if the most you could possibly get from the best case scenario of pulls from a box was say, $20- then you shouldn’t/wouldn’t be seeing too many people buy boxes for OVER that $20. Meaning, most people would be willing to gamble/risk an average pull yield. If I had a chance to buy a box selling for 10 dollars and the most I would lose is $5, with a potential to make $20 at the very best, then that’s not a bad price, right? But that would just be short-term investment strategy. I guess the other dimension in this would be estimated price increase over time, which I feel is what a lot of people here sort of do to corner the market. If a box is gonna pull cards valued from $5-$20 now, but in 10 years the same cards within will have a minimum value of $10-30, then people won’t mind paying a higher value in this moment in time if they’re in it for the long haul and don’t mind sitting on them.
This is making my head hurt though. I’d love to know how this all works myself.
Perceived value of cards in any given set is what sets the box price.
Then you have scarcity of the boxes after that.