I preference the start of this thread being IMO so nobody thinks any of this is factual and this is just my 2 cents. I know this topic is a buzzkill to most people on here but I like to keep it real and you can insult me all you want in the comments below.
I think the trading card world is starting to get on the same level as a pyramid scheme. The companies at the top are making bank and the resellers are somewhere in the middle. The end customers are the ones that are most likely to be burnt the most. The hobby is being over taken by adults who are mostly in it for the money. People think they are going to be rich by doing exactly what everyone else is doing, which is buying cards today and holding them long term, something that people really didnt do in the past. I see this happening in every single TCG no less. Yugioh with starlight rares, MTG with collectors boxes and even outside of TCGs with video games having collectors editions and funko pops. Its all going to be like beanie babies more likely.
Most collectibles don’t accumulate in value when everyone is doing the same thing with them. The Honus Wagner baseball card didnt get to over a million dollars since everyone bought up baseball cards and sent them to PSA back in the day. I dont see most of these modern cards being worth much in the future since too many people are preserving them. Very few people held boxes of base set back in the day since the hobby was mostly for kids and kids opened them. There has to be organic attrition for a collectible to increase drastically in value. If people are holding warehouses of this stuff, it wont ever be valuable.
And with the rise of social media, you have these influencers all over the internet pushing what a great idea it is to “invest” in this stuff. There are guys who are like the 40 year old virgin but are less funny than steve caroll who have houses full of unopened toys and say that they never plan to part with them. Most of these people are just manipulating the market to sell this stuff. And what is sad is that people believe it and dump tons of money into it. Even though the people running the youtube channels or the instagram pages are the only ones really benefiting. Everyone else is just at the bottom of the pyramid getting suckered in, thinking they will be rich someday, but they wont.