I agree, a lot has changed since this report and there’s been some very big sales even compared to the biggest Sports cards in recent times. My main point is that within both vintage & modern Pokemon it still doesn’t really come close to the higher number of high ticket items in Sports where there’s even a higher number of expensive individual cards going through auctions weekly.
But with Pokemon it’s quickly growing and catching up where many cards are now getting into 5, 6, 7 figure ranges more often than ever.
And yes, compared to artwork and other collectibles all of these hobbies are still pretty small. I’m not anticipating that we’ll ever get that big, but I still feel we have good room to grow over time due to a wide variety of reasons.
Fanatics Fest was 80% Pokemon. I’ve never heard of Fanatics Fest but a brief look at the website makes that hard to believe. Was it just a comicon with athletes?
There’s a higher number of higher ticket items in sports cards, but there’s also a lower number of each of those sports cards out there. The VAST majority of those cards are 1 of 1s. Not PSA10 Pop 1 - LITERALLY ONLY ONE COPY EVER PRINTED. Which is something Pokémon doesn’t do, and is very different from those random PSA10 pop 15-100 “low pop” Pokémon cards going for 6 figures.
In a hobby this big, PSA 10 pop 15 - 100 is very little. Pokémon is the biggest media franchise. Comparing things can be useful, but it can also mean drawing wrong conclusions.
I agree. I’m just pointing out (in response to @jabby’s prior comment) that even though there are likely more sports cards worth 100k or more than there are Pokémon cards worth 100k or more, there are WAY more copies of each of the Pokémon cards.
I understand. It´s just that when you say things like ´low pop´ it makes it seem like you think a POP 100 isn´t low. That might have been the case 10 years ago, but in this age a POP 1000 can even be considered low. It´s when you start going up to the 10k that the card can be called abundant, and even then it´s kind of low for big chases.
I was buying most English pokemon categories outside PSA 10s so its quite possible. But random bulk cards were not 100k or even 1k at that time. Nothing I bought at the time felt particularly insane or changed its price 500% in a month
*Older, minter, rarer, better* matters but not as much as demand does, especially when pops are below a certain amount.
This hobby is so thinly liquid that even a relatively small amount of money can move a pop 1000 up in price very quickly…the same is true on the downturn too.
Thin liquidity works both ways.
Personally low pop for modern chases is anything below 1k but also look at gem rate %.
My buying decisions are made easier when a card has a 20% gem rate or lower (modern).
Exactly. Late 2024 was when things started getting crazy again.
Gem rate reflects the demand, and when chases are very big (think a Greninja Gold Star POP 3k, 53k graded) the demand is so high that even a number relatively big is kind of small. An even more extreme example is the 21k Moonbreon.
I wasn’t really trying to make a direct 1:1 comparison that way, but more so just trying to describe the growing trend of Pokemon card values over time. I understand the pop factors, but it’s still very impressive to me to see how many Pokemon cards have continued to grow over time, despite the usually higher pop numbers they have.
My main thoughts really are - will we get to a point where a lot of these 3 or 4 figure set cards or similar push to 5 or even 6 figures over time?
For example, I have a PSA 10 1st Ed Base Set Magikarp I paid $350 for. I’ve now seen several auctions at $5000+ this year. If someone told me this 2-3 years ago, I would have thought they were crazy.
So I just feel there could be some untapped potential in a lot of these cards still, and the popularity & demand for what is available just seems really strong to me as time goes on.
Eh, maybe some of them, but probably not the ones with 5 figure PSA10 pops. For example, Moonbreon at $100k would have a market cap of nearly $2billion.
Sports card got regulated pretty hard in the 80s and early 2,000s. If it hadn’t I would imagine it would be untouchable. Pokemon has yet to be regulated and when (and if) that comes the market’ll be vastly different than what it is now. Neat numbers though
Perhaps it is not that modern is overpriced, but that everything else is underpriced in this current paradigm where objectively low population matters.
What regulation did they face?
Don’t they also have so many 1 of 1s that some of them are worthless?
In the 80s TOPPS was ruled as a monopoly, so they separated it so that 2 other companies could make and sell sports cards. And in the early 2,000s the industry made distinctions on what constitutes as a rookie card to fight against apparently deceitful practices.
I would imagine that the US government would like for the $1.3M going toward a fire chicken to be going toward legitimate businesses instead. Also I can’t see them liking private equity companies putting their assets into cardboard instead of, again, legitimate business.
However, the US government has other pressing issues and I can’t imagine Pokemon being on their top 1,000 list of things to do. So it gon be a while lol
Assuming the receiving end of that 1.3M is just some collector that finally decided to sell, wouldn’t the money still be going to legitimate local businesses as that person will use that money to live off of for decades to come? I guess at some point the only people holding these types of cards are not collectors
