My feeling is that we will reach a point where this generation of mega collectors will hit retirement age and try to cash in and there won’t be anywhere near as many younger collectors interested in those cards for the prices they have commanded.
You can’t be nostalgic for empty shelves and scalper priced stock.
No, next question
Ready, set, speculate!
I will say pokemon is generally a fun/easy/profitable BUSINESS now
plus in the USA nobody wants to work a real job
so nope its not going back
Unless there’s a massive depression/deflation I don’t think cards printed pre-2020 will see those nominal prices again. $100 in December 2019 is ~$125 today and I think there’s enough ingrained speculation to keep a floor that’s above those levels.
In real terms on a long enough time horizon, I think lower grade and non-WOTC cards that aren’t overly popular could lose to inflation.
I think anything released in the last few years will fall in any type of slowdown in the stock market or crypto.
The same people who were okay losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on sports prospects are in here now, so no, we aren’t going back.
No, there is absolutely no chance of seeing pre-2020 prices again. I do expect to see pre-2025 prices again soon, but pre-2020 prices are magnitudes beyond what a reasonable retraction would be. Anyone who says Pokemon is going to zero (or pre-2020 prices) is coping.
I would say that it’s very likely that many of the mass produced modern cards and high pop vintage cards, especially non holos will drop significantly over time. Not to zero of course. I believe the “blue chip” scarcer cards will continue to go higher for the foreseeable future
Unfortunately I find it incredibly unlikely we’ll see those prices again. Maybe when the crypto/sneaker/fast-money ‘collectors’ finally move onto the next ‘big money’ thing (Labubu maybe?) I think we could see some adjustments, but nothing anywhere close to pre-2020.
Yes, a k-shaped recovery often occurs during a retracement. High-end and rare cards can stay high because of the demand and limited supply, but easy-to-obtain cards drop off.
Give it a century and they’ll be like hummels and fine china though I’m sure the rarest and best pieces are still worth something.
Short answer is yes. Long answer is sort of. As you all know I’m not the typical collector on E4 and operate in different circles. This topic has been on my mind for a little while as I am completing my TR collection. Warning yapping ahead.
Stores aren’t able to keep vintage bulk in stock because it has higher demand but sold at the same price as modern. Stores won’t raise prices on vintage and won’t seek it from collectors. They only gain vintage bulk from buying whole collections. In general, there’s cards with high demand which aren’t stocked because the stores aren’t willing to pay collectors the amount of money to part with their cards. The velocity of vintage sales in store is slowing down and moving to online.
I think the movement of vintage online decreases prices and alters the perception of scarcity. I also move it out of the public eye decreasing demand and velocity farther.
If vintage crashes in price I don’t think modern has the affinity to hold the public’s interest outside of profit. The most popular and recognizable pokemon are the earlier ones. Modern and it’s pull rates look a lot more like what we’ve seen with other fads and not with pokemon historically. So if I were to make an argument I would say that modern could reach zero but vintage will hold value. I’m not going to make that argument because although I remember some cards in Base being worth over $100 by 2004 I can’t attest to them retaining their value by 2009.
I speculate that pokemon cards had value because it organically retained interest for 10 years due to multiple well received products. They were balancing incoming new customer with losing customers nostalgically tied to the older products. This must have not been sustainable and pokemon started targeting the 151 demographic. There are now in an inorganic phase not rooted actual interest in their originating driving product, the games.
You know there has to be something wrong when they never did a 151 for gen 2 when the target customer are the same age. There is no organic sustainable hype sounding modern and it stands entirely on the back of vintage nostalgia. Vintage is heading for a down turn and there is nothing modern can do to save itself when the bottom falls out. There will be blood in all these cards shops that have popped up recently. I expect prices to be pre 2016 but not at whatever 2009 was.
Also why is there so much profit in nostalgia with this generation.
In my opinion, no, we will not see 2020 prices again. Nor will we see 2024 prices again for many items. 2025 will be a year where new floors for many items will be set.
Even if 70% of the new hobbyists drop Pokemon in a year there is still a massive amount of money and interest that will remain, keeping prices post-hype higher than that before.
If counterfeiting catches up to perfectly replicate any era of Pokémon on a molecular level, there may be a drastic shift in the overall perception of tcg collecting. Otherwise it will take immeasurable momentum to wipe all of the popularity Pokémon gained since 2020 to see those prices return
Do you see Mario Pikachu cards going for $50? Many of us would be buying them in bulk before they ever dropped that low. And the same goes for a lot of other cards too.
I mean, outside of specific cards & slabs in certain grades.. I feel like there were some serious deals in 2022/2023 that were touching early 2020 to pre-2020 pricing at times on certain cards. It’s just now this year the market has largely recovered and moved up again, especially on the vintage side. But in general I do not believe we’ll see pre-2020 pricing again, especially on sealed or any type of card that has good collector demand and value.
All of these cards to me have new ‘price floors’ which are unlikely to be broken downward ever again as the market has simply grown so much bigger since 2020 that it’s basically impossible to drive the prices down that much again. Combine all this with the way everything else has changed since 2020 (inflation, economy, mindset, knowledge, etc) and you have a system that simply won’t allow pre-2020 pricing again unless there was a massive fundamental shift in Pokemon collecting as a whole at some point.
However, every indicator we have shows nothing but positive growth & demand for years to come. Modern is extremely healthy, and vintage has been closing the gap this year again after it’s correction phase post-Covid. So I really can’t see a place or time where we’ll be getting anything near pre-2020 prices, too much has changed.
seems my post was taken as saying prices will be like 2018, to be clear I wasn’t saying that. There is an insane amount it needs to drop from August 2025 to get to 2018. You can have a very steep decline and still not hit 2018.
To add, people seem to forget Pokemon is printing more supply daily. There isn’t a finite number of trophy cards…what are we up to 32 no 1,2,3,4 Pikas earned at Worlds now? More than 8 sets now I think. 4 for TCG, VGC, Go, whatever else there is.
Pokemon is also printing hype chase cards every set. People can’t keep up with it. If this goes until we are all retired 20-30 years from now, figure another 200 billion cards printed atleast.
All of this is with the following two caveats:
I got back into Pokemon in late 2019. Just the other night, I was looking at the prices I was paying right when I returned, and I was floored. I had forgotten just how cheap some of this stuff was so recently.
$20 for a PSA 9 Scyther ex from Ruby Sapphire. $60 for a PSA 9 TRR Rocket’s Hitmonchan ex. $30 for a PSA 9 EX Dragon Latios ex. $35 for a PSA 9 Crystal Guardians Kyogre ex. Among countless other examples. Stuff that would today sell for 7-10x these prices.
These prices feel so distant and so quaint. But I actually don’t think it’s impossible we see a return to these prices at some point. Just look at how radically our perceptions of value have changed in the past 5 years. There’s no law of the universe, or even a law of collectibles, that makes it so perceptions of value can’t move in the opposite direction.
That said, if I had to bet, I don’t think we’ll see 2019 prices again on these cards. I’m older and have significantly more financial resources now, as typically happens when people progress through life. The current prices for most of the cards I collect/want (with some exceptions, like gold stars) feel pretty reasonable to me. Even as a not particularly wealthy person from a relatively modest background, everything I want I either already have or can afford (or foreseeably afford) to buy. This, to me, implies that things are priced at pretty non-insane levels. Still, if interest in the hobby wanes significantly, the cards I collect could easily decline by 50%, but I have a very difficult time envisioning the 80-95% retrace that would be required for us to return to 2019 prices.
no
