The title might be a bit confusing so let me elaborate:
If you look up the Japanese Yugioh Starter Deck 2018 on ebay, you will notice that some of them are really expensive. That’s because in the first print of these Starter Decks, you would pull an additional token card OR a very rare card from the past, as these cards were randomly included in the first print of the starter deck in very small numbers (between 10 an 300 copies per rare card). And these cards were really rare, for example they included 10 copies of the rarest Blue-Eyes White Dragon in the game (Jump Festa) and 10 copies of the first version of the Dark Magician Girl (G3-11) as Secret Rare, of which only 300 copies existed so far. I also want to emphasize that (to my knowledge) these reprints are indistinguishable from the original versions. There is no indicator on the card that marks them as cards from 2018.
That got me thinking: Would you approve of the Pokemon Company doing something similar? For example, imagine them releasing a run-of-the-mill theme deck and announcing that they randomly inserted one Illustrator, 5 parent-child Kangaskhan and 10 Play promo Umbreon (among other slightly less rare cards from the past) among all produced decks and guaranteed that these cards would be identical to their original release. Would you like that? Or would that just be overkill in the current scalper climate?
I’d prefer they didn’t. I think it sets a bad precedent. Re-printing is always a murky subject. I prefer the cards retain their history and originality.
I think a golden ticket in every xxxx decks/packs woud be pretty cool, but not for reprints of the originals. I think if you could get something like how they did with the original lottery eCard campaign, that would be cool. But reprints, I think would be almost like a shot at collectors who paid mass amounts of money for rare cards.
I’d rather they do new cards than reprint older ones. Let the old cards stay old and keep their history. Create new cards and let them create their own hobby history going forward.
Yu-Gi-Oh is a cautionary tale about how to fuck up a card game, IMO.
A huuuuge part of Pokémon’s continued desirability as a collectible derives from the genuine scarcity of old, rare, iconic cards. Obviously, TCPi makes no money off secondary market sales, and they only get a direct paycheck from distributors in the months a set is in print. They haven’t made a dime off Skyridge since 2003-2004. However, the more people are interested in collecting vintage, the more people are going to buy modern product, so they still have a vested interest in the market for vintage. Cards are the most fun to collect if they’re rare, and the more unique a rare card is, the more desirable it is for collectors.
With very limited exceptions (Evolutions being the most notable), reprinting cards in any capacity is a great way to torpedo desirability and collectability into the sun. The entire basis of the market for vintage/graded Yu-Gi-Oh is the 1st Edition stamp… Konami has printed the unlimited version of every classic set into the ground to make a quick buck, and reprinted every iconic card as a common with identical art a trillion times. I get that the 1st Edition stamp holds a lot of value in Pokémon, too, but it’s not like unlimited Neo Genesis Lugia is worthless because they printed it for fifteen years and there are twenty different rarities of it in reprint sets.
Reprinting classic cards in an identical form as the original prints would completely nuke the market. They’d have to significantly alter the cards in some way, like putting a “lottery” stamp on them, giving them a new set number, etc., and even that seems like a slippery slope. Cool idea, but seems problematic from a practical standpoint.
