TL;DR: “the hobby is young” and “just hold quality long enough and you win” probably matter way less than people think. Rare coins are basically the grown-up version of where we say we’re headed, and over there the broad market went flat-real for ~25 years while only the genuinely rare stuff appreciated. Old + popular isn’t the same as rare, and time doesn’t fix that, so it’s worth knowing which pile your cards are actually in.
So, I think two things this community agrees on is that the hobby is still early, and if you hold quality long enough, you win. I’m not going to argue against either in the way that the crash-callers/bubble-people usually do (even if I did do a bubble post recently :P), since they’ve been wrong for years and they’ll (probably) keep being wrong. Instead, I want to poke at something else, more narrow and uncomfortable, which is that “mature enough, and held long enough” is not automatically “up”. I also think that we don’t have to guess, because there’s already a natural experiment for what a fully mature, deep, institutionalized collectible does to the people holding it, and it happens to be the market that looks most like where we keep saying we’re headed…
Rare coins are the oldest, deepest, most professionalized collectible on earth, since they have grading, price guides, institutional money, and over a century of provenance infrastructure. If “mature store of value” guarantees anything, it should guarantee it there.
The broad rare-coin index (the PCGS3000) returned about 1.1% per year from 2000 to 2025, nominal. That’s a quarter century of losing to inflation. Over the exact same window, the narrow Key Dates & Rarities index did roughly 4.8%/yr. And the broad index peaked in 1989 and spent decades underwater, meaning a buyer at that top had to wait a very long time just to get back to even.
Read that gap slowly, because it’s essentially the whole post. Maturity did not lift the coin market, it lifted the genuinely scarce and left everything else flat-real for a generation. So even though “time in the market” is real, in the one mature collectible we can actually study, time only ever paid the key-dates.
Here in Pokémon we already believe the mechanism that explains it, which is that rarity regulates durability, and popularity sets the magnitude. Everyone here pretty much would agree to that, if I had to guess. So let’s actually apply it, honestly, to ourselves.
“Vintage” is not one single asset, because it splits. On the one side, we have the genuine key-date-tier scarcity like the Illustrator, the No-Rarity Charizard, top trophies, finest-known 1st Edition Base keys, etc. On the other we have everything-else-vintage, like common holos, mid-grade WOTC, the “popular but available” cards (ie: the Evolutions-Charizard profile which spikes, then retraces). The coin case says only the first tier is reliably rewarded by maturity, while the second tier is the PCGS3000, and the PCGS3000 went nowhere real for 25 years.
So I would dare to say that the most of what gets bought and held as a “vintage investment” is the second tier. And time does not reclassify it, meaning that age by itself is not scarcity, and a Base Set Unlimited common which was printed at warehouse scale (roughly 60% of every Pokémon card in existence was printed after 2020, but even the genuinely old commons ran into the billions) is both old and abundant. Aging it another decade doesn’t make it a key-date. So saying “just hold vintage” assumes your card is in the tier that survives, and usually it isn’t.
The four most expensive objects in the four biggest collectible classes are: a coin at $18.87M, a Pokémon card at $16.49M, a comic at $15M, and a sports card at $12.93M. Four unrelated markets, all inside a ~$13–23M band.
That number doesn’t seem to be set by fandom size, because if it were, these four wouldn’t be neighbors. It’s set by how many people on earth will put eight figures into a single trophy, which is a pool shared across every collectible, competing with fine art and watches too. Franchise size seems to buy breadth at the bottom, and not height at the top as we might otherwise assume. So claiming Pokémon is still young because it’s the “biggest IP in history” is close to irrelevant at the ceiling, and to the extent the ceiling rises, it rises with global wealth concentration, and not with anything about Pokémon being young or big.
Which brings me to the actual point of this post, which is that the two variables this hobby seems to lean on hardest (youth and franchise size) are the two that matter least at both ends. The top is effectively wealth-gated, while the middle is scarcity-gated, and time is not a substitute for either.
My first thought when looking this up and thinking about this was “well if there’s already at least a Pokémon card in that wealthy band, is Pokémon already mature? Are we at the top then?”. Well, I’m not calling it a top, since retraces here have historically been tier-sorts, where the speculative band flushes, genuine scarcity holds, and the floor frequently ratchets up afterward. That cycle is real, I think those of us that have been here pre-2020 or even pre-2024 would agree to that, so I’m not disputing it. My only real departure from the “the floor always ratchets up” view is that it’s been induced from a single, unusually generous regime: a 25-year secular bull, mass financialization, and a once-in-a-generation liquidity event in 2020. Therefore, the coin market here is just the reminder that the ratchet can stall for a generation while only the apex keeps moving, and saying “it’s always gone up” is precisely what the coin market said in 1989.
There’s also the open, genuinely bullish variable of penetration I can’t pretend to know/divine. If China and the rest of the world onboard the way the West did, and if the next generation’s nostalgia attaches to physical cardboard rather than to Pocket, then obviously the demand base widens and a lot of this softens the bear-case read. Nobody really knows which way that breaks. But do notice it’s a demand-breadth question, and not a “number goes up because the IP is big and the hobby is young” question.
Given all this, I can already imagine some of the counter-arguments I’ll get here:
“This is priced-out cope”. I still think genuine scarcity will appreciate, if anything this whole post is an argument for concentrating there, which is the opposite of a crash call.
“Coins aren’t Pokémon”. Well, yeah, the broad index isn’t, it’s full of generic bullion-content coins. That’s the point, it’s the analog for abundant Pokémon, and the key-date index is the analog for genuine scarce vintage. The split here is the lesson, and not a mismatch.
“The floor always ratchets up here”. For 25 years, inside the largest liquidity expansion in history, so big caveat/asterisk. See: coins, 1989.
“The real demand is silent and you’re reading the loud minority”. Well yeah, fair prior, and partly true. But “the invisible base will hold up the mid-tier” isn’t really testable in advance, and the coin market had a deep silent collector base too…
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Anyways, to kinda wrap things up, I’m starting to think it was never “it’s a bubble”, and nobody who’s held through a cycle believes that, and they’re right not to. The comfort blanket here is the belief underneath, which is that time, plus the biggest IP in history, makes the floor rise for holders like us. At the top, the floor is set by billionaires, not by average consumer. In the middle, it’s set by genuine scarcity, not by patience. Time only ever seems to have paid the key-dates.
So rather than saying things will go up or down in a general way, I might instead say/conclude that you could go sort your binder, is it truly key-date-scarce, or merely old and liked? Everything in the first pile, history says maturity rewards, and everything in the second, the most comparable mature market on earth held flat-real for a generation. “Young” and “big” don’t seem move either pile, and knowing one you’re actually holding might help long-term depending on your objectives.
Good question though! My pfp is AI, but I’m also not acting like I did it myself lol