Are we specifically talking about TG cards from Bstars-Silver Tempest, or swsh era alt arts and tg and gg cards (and even sv)
I agree with this. But I also think we have a small view of just how big this hobby is. If you can get 2000 graded copies of Giratina V in PSA 10 and still keep a price of $700 you have to admit there’s at least currently larger demand than many would think possible for such a high pop. I can personally tell you that card is phenomenal and I have no plans to sell mine. I think a lot of people will hold them provided we don’t see a mass exodus from the hobby. We may be in a new era where we get a nice slow even growth of Pokemon over the years and if that’s the case I think these chase cards will continue to do well. I didn’t buy Giratina V because everyone else wants it. I wanted it. Its a legitimately good card with a 1/700 pull rate. It has enough of the rarity factor in there to make it seem valuable to me but the art itself is simply fantastic and up there for me as one of the best.
I don’t disagree popularity can wane. I personally won’t buy Umbreon VMAX. I suspect it will continue to be remembered as the chase card of the sword and shield era and so i think it will likely do well. I personally don’t love it so I’m not going to pay that kind of price with the downside risk I may hold something I don’t like. On the flip side if people like something they may hold throw a slump which I could see happening with a bunch of these chase cards.
Like a said picking the card is crucial. Just as there are cards from XY that are not worth anything today there are others that are worth a lot. So it does take some skill and some luck to pick the right ones. My main point was I don’t think its fair to make a blanket statement that these won’t be valuable due to overprinting.
For the Boomers here there really was 1 real chase card: the base set Charizard. Psa 10 pop around 400-500
For the current younger generation there are probably already 100+ and increasing rapidly chase cards with psa 10 pops over 10k
Base set charizard psa 9 ‘the boomers chase’ is still around 1k with a pop lower than modern cards but yet some people think all the current modern chase cards will do better in 20 years while some are already as expensive.
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I understand what you mean. But I think the market is just WAY bigger than we can even wrap our heads around. Thought experiment using random quantities:
Let’s say there are 5 million kids age 8 to 12 collecting pokemon during Sword and Shield. I have no idea how many but this seems reasonable considering the entire english market of US, Canada, Europe, etc. Right now the only money they have is what their parents give them. Most of the Alt Arts lets be honest are in adult collectors hands. But you know those kids want those chase cards. Ten years from now let’s say only 1/1000 of them either still collect Pokemon or decide to get back into it or pick up some of their favorite cards for nostalgia’s sake. That’s 5000 collectors who might be finally starting to get some real money of their own and they may want to go chase the big hitters of their childhood era. They could easily start gobbling up the top chases that are for sale driving prices up. Also remember this generation is the social media generation. They may want to show off their purchase of picking up that grail card from their childhood.
These are all random numbers that could be totally off, but it’s just a thought experiment. I can see the demand going up in the future when those next generations start to get money and it’s not just the adults collecting the top chases.
It’s almost exactly one year since Lost Origin came out (wow time flies), and there are nearly 5,000 Giratina V alt arts graded at PSA alone. There is nothing rare about this card.
Is it difficult to pull from individual packs? Sure. But the population of packs is so immensely large that pull rates (hypothesized or actual) are irrelevant.
What you are referring to is scarcity, when the number of available copies doesn’t adequately meet demand. Scarcity is completely dependent on demand, which may not necessarily hold as newer, cooler cards are released. 
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This is a very fair point. But I don’t think that many people who collected back then have gotten back into it. I collected back then and I don’t know a single person in my friend group, family, etc who collected back then that got back into it. Most exited the hobby. It was seen as a fad back then. I think it’s possible/probably that future generations will stay engaged longer and not have this exit reentry as much as the WOTC era had. Also the constant chase makes it more exciting to keep collecting and keeps them wanting the next thing.
I could be wrong but these are my reasons I guess. Its been an interesting conversation though @bill and I definitely respect your thoughts and opinions on this. I could be totally wrong lol.
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I think this is a misconception. How many D&P- or B&W-era kids are showing off their D&P/P or B/W chase cards that they wanted as a child? Very few. @fourthstartcg and @qwachansey come to mind, but they are few and far between.
I think the “average” Pokemon consumer right now in 2023 cares more about flex culture and wants to flex the flavor of the month, and less about childhood nostalgia. I don’t see that changing much in the future now that Pokemon is permanently affixed to IG/Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/etc.
Fair enough scarcity is a better word. I guess rarity itself is kind of a loaded word. Relative to what? To the rarest card? Or to demand?
Why does 1st edition PSA Charizard with PSA 10 POP of 124 sell for $240k while T4 Typholosion with a pop of only 4 sell for what $50k? It’s the rarity/scarcity relative to demand. The charizard has greater demand relative to its pop.
The fact that a modern card with 2000 PSA 10’s (5000 total pop) can command a $700 premium should tell us at least that the market is BIG. Could that not translate to a larger pool of buyers for certain cards making them scarce enough to do well?
Look I’m not saying Giratina V Alt Art in PSA is going to increase the same way a base set 1st edition Charizard did. But the original argument is they won’t increase and will decrease. I just don’t think that takes demand into account. Its demand versus supply that matters.
Also more people want graded cards than back then. I think the premium of graded to raw in the future won’t be as high as vintage but just because there are a lot of graded cards doesn’t mean the card can’t have a high demand.
Interesting take. I would argue the D&P and B&W era just didn’t have that great of cards. But please don’t shoot me. Lol I just don’t care for most of the cards from that era and I think the number of people collecting was probably pretty small wasn’t it? Wasn’t pokemon overall pretty small until Pokemon Go?
The flex culture is fair. But that same flex culture caused base set charizard to fly high during the pandemic and settle after a much greater floor. So I think social media culture can actually push up old and new cards, not just the latest release.
If it really was just the latest release, why are Tag Teams catching fire?
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This is such a great sentence, does anyone care about the rainbow pikachu from a few years ago? The gold mew from celebrations? Does anyone know about the trainer gallery cards of cosmic eclipse?
This is the faith of modern set cards. In a few years the current trainer gallery cards will also be forgotton because there are 500 new nicer looking cards available.
My biggest thing against high-pop modern is that newer modern releases are theoretically going to continue eating away at their market share.
Tag Teams caught fire because these cards are much scarcer than the alternate arts from SwSh, guess it just took a while for people to notice. Keep in mind that when looking at population reports, the more valuable a card is, the more incentive there is to grade.
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Tag Teams increased because there were unfounded rumors that alt arts (or the equivalent of alt arts) would be disappearing in Scarlet/Violet. And as @tm26 mentioned, fewer proportionally were graded at the time that people started to buy them up, and the rest is history (supply/demand).
You are right that Pokemon wasn’t as big in DPP and BW, but there were a lot of children who played the games. And there should be some level of cross-pollination between cards and games.
This is totally fair. But at the same time I’m talking more long term than the 2 years since that rainbow Pika came out. I think you’ll always have high popularity > drop > then later if the card is good the price and popularity can increase. Not every card wins. Mass released trainer galleries on the whole probably won’t do well I agree.
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Interesting I would argue people went back to them because they liked the art and liked the idea of featuring two pokemon together. Sure some probably cared about pop. But I think a lot of people just want to collect them because they think they are cool.
I do think its interesting we will say people are just chasing what’s popular but then we say that they are actually checking pop reports before buying. These seem to describe two different buyers to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of consumers don’t even check the pop report before buying a tag team card.
Team Up, Unbroken Bonds, Unified Minds had fairly limited print runs if I recall. People don’t necessarily need to care about population, the price will go up if the supply isn’t there for the demand.
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Thats probably true as well, but last week i saw a guy who just got back 15 psa 10, latios / latias tag team full arts. When modern set prices suddenly increase, people will send massive amounts of these cards to grading companies and most of the time demand cant keep up with those supply increases
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Buyers are not cookie-cutter molds. We make generalizations when talking about population trends, but there are hundreds of reasons why someone may buy a card that we are not privy to. Maybe they are a species collector, or a set collector, or they think it’ll stonk, or they like the pop report numbers, or they got paid on Friday, or they got a birthday gift card, or they think it’s pretty, or their friend told them about it and they want to feel cool, etc. etc. etc.
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Oh agree, but I don’t really care about sudden spikes and drops though as a collector. Those are bubbles. They happen. The better question as a collector, is in 10-25 years will this card slowly appreciate?
Side note: It cracks me up a little that there is a lot of negative sentiment on vintage not doing as well as the pandemic pump. But my take is totally different. That pandemic pump was so big that the new floor for the entire market, vintage included is WAY higher than before. Everything went way up from before. That’s incredible. Even if half the people that entered in 2020 left the hobby, the overall number of people collecting Pokemon is now a lot higher it would seem than pre pandemic. Home run in my opinion for any era Pokemon collector.
100% I agree. I guess I was just trying to say we can’t assume everyone is running to the pop report to make a smart purchasing decision and yet also just be buying due to hype. The crossover of these two feels negligible to me.
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