I only have the pull rate estimation for you.
edit: I misunderstood you meant what do I think SHOULD be printed. I’d say whatever happened with SV base set felt right. So that. Whatever that is.
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That’s a similar amount or possibly more than the chase cards, well not even chase, hit cards of SM I think.
The only issue with it is that there are no booster boxes for this set so it’s more difficult for the supply of the card to make its way onto the market.
As an aside, ETBs are a shit product that should be rethought.
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Its an official statement, x.com . Its also likely PR coverage because I doubt they werent expecting this or werent already running printers to capacity.
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RIP to the whatnot chads who spent 90$ a pack
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It’s good they’re printing more. But at the same time, with how much they’ve hyped this with the special reverse holos, Eeveelutions, different releases with promos throughout the year, and the whole “Year of the Eevee”, I would’ve figured they’d see the demand and kinda up their expectations and print more. Instead they now have to do this. I could be totally off since I don’t know how it works on a business level, but it did seem like it’d basically be printing money if they had just printed more before release.
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I feel like the set hasnt even released yet and people are dooming out on social media and “quitting the hobby.” It was only a few months ago that product was sitting around, pretty easily available (going off my experience, anyway). How many times can we do this song and dance about pull rates and reprints? Not talking abt any one person or even E4 specifically, I’m just kinda surprised to see some of the public sentiment i guess
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To be fair to Pokemon, the last several weeks have seen a massive boom in interest and prices pretty much across the board for modern. Don’t forget that preorders for Terastal Festival never sold out on Pokemon Center Japan, and Prismatic Evolutions preorders were up for several hours if not a day.
While it’s clear now that there’s much more interest, that interest has probably been exacerbated even more by the happenings over the last couple weeks. Many people don’t want something until they can’t have it.
As @needszeebs said, the set hasn’t even officially released yet. I can’t fault Pokemon too much for not anticipating a major market boom immediately before a special set release, but they should get more printed soon.
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you’d think they’d have anticipated increase in interest due to pokemon pocket in addition to all of these. Most of this issue is effecting all inventory of pokemon cards. Prismatic isn’t even out and everything is just gone. So of course the most obvious “lets make a popular set” move would cause issues when aligned with the release of a massive pokemon application, and a pokemon card related one at that.
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just say triple 
I don’t think there is any reason to be cynical towards people for feeling dejected, frustrated and thus, walking away. There are a lot of people, new and old who are just throwing their hands up. I’ve seen and heard casual and dedicated collectors alike declare they simply have no interest in keeping up with this rat race of hunting product. Life is too short, and if its making one upset, one should simply find something else to do instead until things aren’t frustrating, or to not come back at all.
I will say I’m in that camp myself. I get what I get, and at this point I have bought what I could right when things were heating up. Now I can’t compete with all the heavy botting so I’m shifting focus. I have other interests, I have many interests. And for cards, I simply shifted my focus to singles of older sets, but even that is frustrating me. In the last 2 months I’ve been scammed more than I have in the last 2 years. So I’m just going to hold out for people to clear out when the gravy train comes to the end of the line.
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Pokemon Company after announcing this news:
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About as good of a situation as we could have hoped for. I’ve never been more excited because it’s easy to sell modern and fairly easy to get modern. And now you can keep all the good vintage stuff!
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I think it is certainly valid to feel frustrated at the situation. I feel it too, it sucks not being able to get the cards you wanna buy. I’m just saying I think people should have a bit of faith and patience. This isn’t the first time this has happened and it probably won’t be the last. Getting on the internet and raging out, pointing fingers at others and doing the whole “true collector” shenanigans isn’t helping anyone (again, not talking about E4 specifically, just speaking to what I’ve been seeing across various social medias)
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oh, yeah no reason to sperg out. Walking away is the only thing you can do really. That or pay double the price. There are definately some systemic flaws with how cards are being allocated, but there is no point to flip out on people over it, but I think its fair to discuss where there might be bad issues in how cards are being sold.
I see what you mean, I wasn’t too aware of anyone freaking out. I’m assuming this is probably more of a reddit thing? I get a sense, I haven’t used that site since 2016 I think.
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I checked out the ebay live today because ryans cardhouse is apparently a wholesaler so he had stacks upon stacks of etbs. potentially hundreds of boxes and he was running them for $54.99
over 16,000 people were in the chat. Imo bots were running wild and people were very upset
I’ve never seen anything like this
I switched over to no name sellers with low view counts, they were easily able to run etbs for $200 and sold out every time
Now with the news of reprint “to maximum capacity” i think a lot of ppl are about to get burned hard
Even English 151, which was the most hyped set of the modern era (possibly challenged by this set) and those boxes were quite easily available. Even amazon you could buy them by the dozen and for prices much lower than what we are seeing for Prismic.
So everyone just relax and dont get fomo and overpay
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If anyone actually bought PE ETB’s before release for $200, they are dumb and deserve to lose money. Survival of the fittest.
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Did something in particular happen over the last few weeks to cause such an influx of interest?
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I can’t think of any particular event we can point to as a catalyst. Right now the market reminds me of the 2023 Japanese waifu boom where there isn’t really a single event which can reasonably explain massive price rises, they’re just happening. In 2016 we could point to demographic factors (I still maintain that Pokemon Go had little effect on TCG prices), 2020 was clearly COVID, but I can’t point to an event that easily explains 2023 or this recent jump.
However, I don’t think it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of only Prismatic Evolutions hype as we have been seeing signs of a strong modern market for a couple months. Surging Sparks selling for above MSRP was the first sign, SWSH boxes going up a lot in December, Van Gogh Pika and SWSH alt arts mooning, etc.
If I had to characterize the causes of the current market, I’d put it as a Pokemon-specific internal cascade of factors. Because Pokemon is so dominated by investment mentality now, the best way for cards to generate attention is to go up in value. The latter half of 2024 saw the ending of most SWSH reprints in English and Japanese now that it’s been over two years since set release. Popular SV sets like 151 are getting reprinted, but less now than they have in the past. Declining availability of top sets and sky-high demand leads to price increases (like we see in December) which fuels further interest. Into a market which the mascot of modern stonks is alt art Eeeveelutions, Pokemon hurls a brand new Eeeveelution set complete with all the alt arts you could hope for. In Japanese, it quickly becomes clear that unlike other recent special sets, the printing is not adequate to meet demand. Prices increase significantly over release day, leading to further increased interest and more eyes on the soon-to-release English set. Japanese prices just keep going up as early Terastal Festival reprint releases fail to meet demand, which removes cheaper options for accessing the set. The increased interest in modern Pokemon spills over to other sets quickly. At least in Japanese, most SV boxes outside of 151 and Clay Burst were available at or below MSRP. Over the last week or two that’s dried up fast. It will be very interesting to see where things go from here, and if Pokemon’s printing is enough to match demand.
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Ive mostly seen a hype loop starting because cut allocation and several sets selling out. A few of the swsh sets have recently sold out with crown zenith rumored to be on its final print, 151 has been selling out because 14packs for $45 is a good deal regardless of set, and prismatic then had its allocation for most shops cut by 90% in some cases. All this drove a lot of hype which bumped up prices when people couldnt find exactly what they were looking for, which repeated several times, again most recently when Journey together preorders sold out quickly and prismatic is looking to have terrible pull rates.
Now its time for prismatic to release and everyone is in such a frenzied loop about not finding product that rumor hype keeps popping up and exploding whereas it would have died down some before.
Other earlier factors are things like pokemon pocket and gamestop grading, both making pokemon more mainstream and acceptable to enjoy for people who werent involved before.
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I agree that the 2023 Waifu Boom was odd and unexpected.
The 24/25 Winter Boom feels closely aligned with the crypto bull run and Pokémon TCG Pocket. I think the get-rich-quick crowd has once again trickled into Pokemon to spend some gains, alongside some massive organic growth in interest from Pocket.
As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats. When small boosts from external factors push prices up temporarily, social media can carry the trajectory and spill over into other sets.
In my estimation, this started with the Pikachu EX from Surging Sparks hitting $3,000 (aligning perfectly with the bitcoin boom to $100,000), then some XY-era Full Arts and promos started to sell higher, then Prismatic Evolution/Terastal Festival was on the horizon, and so on, and so on.
As FOMO goes, this feels eerily similar to 2020.
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