Gold stars/ex are the hot bubble topic at the moment, but I was looking at Obsidian Flames this morning and noticed that the price of a case is twice as much as if you were to buy each pack individually ($10 vs $5). Sealed product intrinsically gains value when it goes out of print and supply begins to decrease; however, that is not the case here.
a period when current asset prices greatly exceed their intrinsic valuation, being the valuation that the underlying long-term fundamentals justify. Bubbles can be caused by overly optimistic projections about the scale and sustainability of growth (e.g. dot-com bubble), and/or by the belief that intrinsic valuation is no longer relevant when making an investment (e.g. Tulip mania).
They probably are, but it doesnāt seem to matter to a lot of people buying. Iām sort of amazed at the prices people are continuing to drop on sets < 5 years old, but I guess it all comes to the āpotentialā of what you may get out of it in the long-term. I picked up a bunch of SWSH sealed in late 2021/early 2022. I think I got a box of Fusion Strike for like ~$70 and Evolving Skies for like $100ish. My jaw pretty much hit the floor looking at the prices of these in such a short time.. especially this year.
Iāve thought about cashing out some of it.. but I really donāt need the money right now. What is more disappointing for me now is I donāt know if Iāll ever get around to building a SWSH era Alt Art set. I collected a few of them in 2022/2023.. but now the prices are just insane that Iād sooner finish up my vintage sets instead. I never would have guessed that modern would reach the heights that it has in such a short time, itās honestly making a lot of vintage cards look cheap to me in comparison.. so Iām not sure if it will all end well for this current market weāre in.
Absolutely. Pokemon center etbs i think are a big speculative bubble. An extra 2 packs and a stamped card at release shouldnt be worth double a normal etb.
A premium is expected whenever you cant find the product. I strongly dislike that in-print sets became scarce enough through supply hoarding that the expected base cost of product has risen. A booster pack shouldnt be $15 when the set is still being released. I see that as a self-fulfilling speculation due to popularity, it happens because people do it and people do it because it happens. Although rationally, with the importance of gambling on grading and risk of scams, i can understand why untouched product would draw a higher value than unsealed.
The biggest thing is that Pokemon tcg has a monopoly over its characters. You canāt really find many similar card styles that include so many different pokemon outside of bootlegs and vintage sets. Whereas other markets compete within themselves through collaborations or other companies using the IP. So if someone wants to collect Spiderman cards, theyve got a ton of different sets and companies across decades to collect from but for Suicune cards, they are stuck only buying almost only ptcg with maybe a dozen sets across two dozen years. The more popular a character is, the more limited the inventory will be, and we are back to speculation on what will be popular multiplied by the desire for good looking cards and multiplied again by the greed of a safe place to store value.
As an aside, that is one of the biggest things i have heard from new ācollectorsā, that they like pokemon and want to buy something they like that wont be worthless in the future if they ever decide to sell.
I personally am cashing out of 99% of my sealed this week. Everything is growing so fast that it does not seem sustainable. SV booster boxes already being higher priced than any possible combination of cards in the set is crazy. It is only going up and I do not feel comfortable about the extreme rapid growth in these products. Could they be worth more in a year? Absolutely, but locking in 2-4x gains on booster boxes and 2-18x on PC ETBs in 1-2ish years seems too hard to pass up. This will be a nice funds boost to reallocate to other parts of my collection instead.
For reference when I think of rapid growth. Last weekend (Labor Day weekend), I put everything into collectr to see what it was worth. Middle of the week I removed about $800 worth of items that I decided that I still wanted to keep. Just checked today and even with removing those items, the app says that my stuff is worth more than today than it was last weekend with those removed items. ~$900 increase in value over one week is stupid.
Pokemon cards as a whole are speculative assets and weāve seen many categories fall into a bubble over the past year.
For sealed specifically, itās become its own type of collectible where the box itself is worth more than the expected value of the cards that can be pulled from the set. With vintage boxes, the value is strongly tied to available supply. For modern sealed (which I assume makes up the majority of most peopleās sealed collection), the speculation toward its future value seems to outweigh the perceived supply where people just believe the product will keep going up forever (irrespective of how much unopened product sits in closets or self storage). Sets with the entire box value concentrated on one big chase card (Silver Tempest) also tend to be strongly tied to the value of the most expensive card in the set.
Normally I donāt even like to discuss numbers or look at them much. But I was confronted with the PC ETB prices by someone I know. I had no idea they got so stupid. the SW/SH ones sat up for over 2 years. Its the only sealed item I care to collect since its a new product line and I could start fresh with it without paying more than MSRP. I was told obsidian flames were basically $1000 each. thats insane. This is modern product. These products are from sets that are still in competitive rotation even. Anyone who has been here the lowest amount of time can tell you what happened with vivid voltage ETBs. $200 each, reprinted into the ground 2 years or 3 years later whatever it was, out of nowhere. How much more then, will they print this into the ground when the price difference between the retail price and second hand price is so much greater?
Food for thought to any investibros lurking, donāt get caught with the bag when reprints hit.
At the point we are at now, they would have to open the flood gates so wide for so many sets just to quell the frenzy. And they seem unwilling to do that since theyāre making a ton of money off of the thought that this stuff is scarce
Maybe when they catch up and demand slows theyāll go back and reprint things but it hardly seems like that would be a more attractive time than now to do it
yup thats what I was implying. Once they caught up and the frenzy cooled off, then they dropped the hammer on reprinting those VV ETBs. It was 2 years from around the start of the covid frenzy. We arenāt even a year into this frenzy. Food for thought, nothing ever plays out exactly the same. But caution is due. People should use their imaginations and use caution.
I think many people look at the past performance of vintage sealed and project it onto modern sealed without any consideration as to why vintage sealed performed the way it did. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces their belief that the price will continue to rise, which in turn, causes the price to rise.
Belief can only sustain prices for so long though. At some point reality will set in and many will be in for a rude awakening.
If CGC or PSA begin to recognize variants of early WOTC, I feel like some packs are incredibly undervalued currently. Less than 1% of the packs visually look different and contain different card variants that are unrecognized by graders. It may be niche but could explode if an article and new labels drop.
lol I thought this when I sold my 151 etbs at 250 when they ran up real quick. Honestly I donāt even know at this point. If investors are switching from other asset classes it could keep going. I think cases are attractive due to more $ per shipment( only have to sell 1 order to make thousands potentially).
I guess if they donāt, then that will have to be the end of my attempts to have what was once a very easy to do sealed collection, very chill and fun at one point!
sealed booster boxes will always command a premium to 36 loose packs (yes it can be 2x or maybe even more). similarly sealed cases will always command a premium to 6 boxes. this is because the sealed box (or case) is the collectible and not the sum of the individual packs that make up it (i would not think about this point to much and just sell sell sell )
well for that box in particular, its coz ppl pumped the value of the charmander promo to like 3500 or something in a psa 10 no idea who would pay that much for a modern card when u coulda got lower tier 1st ed psa 10 base holos (nido, poli, zappy) for not much more the past few years
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