Rebuttal from Buffet on how 99% of e4 is wrong, incoming in 3, 2, 1 … down below
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This stuff really sketches me out. How can we really unironically expect growth on this stuff? Pops are like 5-10x that of popular cards from earlier eras (still modern) while the ratios between psa 9/10 is up 2-4x as well.
Any amount of thought at all would point to this stuff not being sustainable. Sure Pokemon popularity is higher now and art is better. But is popularity and artwork 10x of what it was just a couple years ago? I don’t know. I, like all of us here on e4, own a good amount of this stuff, but every single time I put 5mins of thought into it, I want to dump it all and buy vintage
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I’ve just noticed this too, Art rares especially are cheaper than their english counterparts 
The world has healed! So so happy!
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In this analogy, flour is the same, alt arts are not. There are multiple alt arts and if only rayquaza and umbreon are stolen would they have been lower while other alts were higher in pull rates than normal? Than the alt art pull rates were not altered, while the seperate pull rates were altered. I dont know a lot about the theft, but it seems like that could be a scenario right?
Pops are 5-10x, but I would argue that interest is 5-10x for modern cards. I just checked on Google trends for number of times ‘pokemon alt art’ was searched in the last year versus ‘pokemon gold star’. That’s not a great example because gold stars are probably more expensive than alt art cards but I wanted to see how many people search for newer cards versus older cards.
I would think that with each batch or print run, they load them all up before printing. So it’s not like they’ll leave the Ray and Umbreon bins empty. So the flour analogy works fine.
yeah maybe demand had 5-10x in the last few years. Just seems so wild!
I think we would need more information about the exact process of how cards get placed into packs to be 100% certain, but again it’s highly unlikely given the information we currently have and some basic guesses we can make about pack filling.
For example, we can assume that the machines that “pack the packs” are loaded by humans and they manually check each box of hits before it gets loaded into the machine. If someone stole anything out of a box, it would be clear that the box isn’t full and it wouldn’t be loaded. Arguably it makes more sense to steal an entire box because it would be much easier to notice a 1/4 empty box with only the biggest hits gone.
Even if it wasn’t caught, or maybe the hits were replaced with other hits (which would still create a gap somewhere, and a random employee can’t print more sheets to fill the stolen slots…but just for the sake of argument) I would assume somewhere in the pack-filling process the hits are randomized or at least ordered in some way, so that you gan guarantee a certain number of hits per box and ensure you don’t get a run of 50 booster boxes in a row with Rayquaza VMAX Alt Arts. During that ordering or randomization process, there would need to be some manual or automated checking to ensure the right number of specific alt art cards are in there. This is another spot where any missing cards would be recognized before they were filled into packs.
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Pop is definitely the more more important difference here
2007 Umbreon 
PSA 9: 140
PSA 10: 55
Total: 493
2021 Umbreon VMAX:
PSA 9: 2,346
PSA 10: 10,074
Total: 13,336
it’s actually 26x more for the total count and 183x more for PSA 10 specifically.
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Wow, the numbers on the 10s vs the 9s are insane for the Umbreon Vmax. Its almost “rarer” to have the 9 over the 10 at this point.
Legitimately frightening to look at those numbers. I wasn’t even going that far back in my original analysis. I guess it gets worse the further you go back
Don’t bother. I tried to post anything to suggest pull rates were affected and it gets deleted. While people can post anything to suggest pull rates are not affected.
Let your degening experiences (and others’
too) be your guide.
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This is my favorite quote on this website.
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That hardly sounds like a big enough sample size 
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Updated analysis from TCGPlayer booster boxes. January and February have been particularly turbulent. Maybe it’s FOMO tied to the $500 breakout ceiling?
I saw somewhere else recently talk about the market movement lately on ES booster boxes.
I was wondering if the increase had anything to do with the Anniversary…Youtubers/streamers getting breaks ready? Interesting to say the least.
If anyone is worried about anything regarding the stolen cards, it should be that whatever price you’re paying is inflated because some thief still has hundreds that they can unload rather than your booster box not having the specific card.
I know that Pokemon caught the one guy who tried to offload at an LGS all at once, but theft seems to be common in their factories. (I think it was the Fusion Strike stolen cards)
Also, I wonder to what extent the PSA population counts should make one worried. Population is related to interest. It’s submitted because it sells not because it doesn’t. The rate for a specific ES rainbow rare is 1 in 49 boxes, at the market price of $500, it’s $24,500. I know it doesn’t work like that given the 20 other rainbows have prices from bulk to $250 but if you still don’t have it, you aren’t going to pull it at those prices.
And I mentioned this elsewhere but I’m wondering what stage of the nostalgia cycle we are at now. I assume it’s heading into DPPHGSS? Low populations protect against shifting demand but at the same time, how much demand really is there for a lot of Pokemon cards? Especially when we’re talking about cards from the lowest print runs/sales/interest. Can’t have nostalgia if you weren’t even there for it.
The card arts also need to be able to withstand time. What once was special, like Black and White full arts, are now bulk in ultra modern sets. It’s difficult to see interest expanding much more than what it already has.
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That was such a stupid move. If you had a stack of a thousand mint Gengar vmax alt arts I think it was, why would you try to offload them all to the same place in a single transaction? Who in their right mind would buy that from some random off the street?
There are nonstop ads/mlm scams about “passive income” yet someone was trying to cash out a stack of dollar bills (probably at typical LCS 40% market rates) that could have just been drip fed to market for a year or more instead.
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Most of these people who work at these print facilities, and I mean it with no disrespect to them, are working there because that’s the best job they can get. And when you work in a place like that there’s a really high chance that one or more people around you is accustomed to doing dubious things to make money. Those individuals are never intelligent and almost always right where they deserve to be in life.
