Absolutely 0%
We saw record inflation from 2021-2024.
If we look the OG “HeDGe aGaiNst INFlAtiOn”, an ounce of gold fluctuated between a whopping $2028 to $2069… and spent most of its time around $1800.
Most cards and sealed product mirrored this by staying the same price or actually going down.
It has to be extremely clear now that a lot of older cards movement is simply from modern fans branching out. The reason why they decided to do that is somewhat unclear still
But it’s no coincidence to me that the specific vintage buy outs/movements align directly with “modern interests” ie. TRR returns, XY new games, alt arts beyond swsh, ponchos, gold stars
personally very curious if the global stock market declines will have any effect on the pokemon market, or if they’re more separate than ever
I wouldn’t be spending any money on cards if you could put the money into buying the tasty dip
The stock market declining may pull money away that would have gone into Pokemon, especially those on the speculating/investing side.
What could hurt the modern/filthy casual market (cabal forever) would be if cost of living increases are significant, and discretionary spending money starts to dry up.
Think those are two separate players in Pokemon, generally.
Maybe this belongs in a separate topic but I just wanted to point out that it appears the Pokemon Center version of the Prismatic ETB is going to be included in the upcoming reprint based on this screenshot below. This used to say “Purchase limit of 2” - now it is 1
Maybe Pokemon will get the printing situation under control right as recession hits!
Big fat L for having purchased the means to print whatever they want, whenever they want
Curiously as of right now, says 2 again
I’m not really sure if the limit on the PC etbs means anything. They said they’re reprinting prismatic, and I assume that means all products for prismatic. It could be specific ones and not PC etbs though. They love hiding the details when they make the “trust us, were on it” posts
The Pokemon market is definitely in a healthy place. 
It’s really hard to say without some multi-layered analysis. I am a bit hesitant to pin it on one cause or another as its more nuanced. For example: we may need to look at at marketing pushes over the past 12 months (pocket included), and probably do some qualitative research with a relatively large group of people who bought physical cards during the same period. Ask them why they got back in, what triggered their interest, things along those lines.
Google trend comparisons, social media talk, news reports and other waves (such as crypto, stocks and so on) are all data points, but none of them alone prove that attention such as search interest equals purchasing behaviour. Even a search for “pokemon cards” could be about digital cards (eg. pocket meta lol), memes, learning to play the game, researching value, some passing curiosity, and so on… Would be cool if the sellers here maybe can agree on some questionaire and then let their buyers fill them out and put all of this together as a starting point
Humans: are naturally self-interested
The Aquabats:
Here’s some data I have on the market (ebay) using a 20day simple moving average across all graded pokemon card sales. Will be interesting to watch over the coming months with all the tariff burdens now in place.
Interesting graph. How did you compile that. That’s just total value of eBay sales.
Mike
Caveat- I’m not a statistician or data scientist so take this all with a grain of salt. If you are feel free to check me.
I started by grouping all the sales in my database by date and language, roughly:
SELECT
st.language, s.date, AVG(s.price) as avg_price, COUNT(1) as count
FROM
sales s
JOIN
card_set st ON s.card_set_id = st.id
WHERE
s.date >= '2024-11-01' AND s.card_set_id IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY
st.language, date
ORDER BY
st.language, date;
I then exported it to a CSV file where I ran the following with pandas and seaborn.
sales_en = pd.read_csv("sales_en.csv", index_col="date", parse_dates=True)
sales_en['ma_20'] = sales_en['avg_price'].rolling(window=20).mean()
sales_jp = pd.read_csv("sales_jp.csv", index_col="date", parse_dates=True)
sales_jp['ma_20'] = sales_jp['avg_price'].rolling(window=20).mean()
sns.lineplot(data=sales_en['ma_20'], label="EN sale prices")
sns.lineplot(data=sales_jp['ma_20'], label="JP sales prices")
The 20day moving average helps to smooth out daily fluctuations in the data to reveal short term trends. These are the 20day moving average put over top of the daily average:
(I feel like it’s generally known already, but if not the spike days are weekends where most auctions are set to end around)
This just ended. Surely this is just hype for destined rivals and will be back down to 550 ish after a few months of release. Well that’s what I’m hoping
Hype has a lot to do with it so I’d expect a retrace.
Or at least I hope so, 1st ed Team Rocket has been screaming “you’re going to miss me when I’m gone” for a while now. It is relatively abundant for the time being though so we’ll see.
What are peoples thoughts on this card? Thinking about picking one up form China but I’m wanting to know if others have it here and what current sentiment is. I like it a lot, but its hard to tell if it is supposed to be textured or not
Do you mean for an investment? Grading? What is your goal with the card long / short term?
Not textured
