Two shops out of hundreds across the country are not indicative of much.
I’ve been to dozens of stores just in Tokyo and paid up to five figures cash and there wasn’t even a bogus AML form to be filled. Latest time I did this was November 2022.
My bank in the UK makes me fill more forms to justify a $5k withdrawal of my own money than any Japanese card shop ever asked me when buying upwards of $10k worth of cards.
I do admit that most stores went from accepting cash only back in 2016, to accepting either cash or card these days, but that seems to have more to do with Covid than with regulatory requirements.
As I said in my original post. I am not saying it happens, but the opportunity is definitely there.
Mostly the rest of the poncho eevees in a 10 that I need, the vulpix pika ponchos, and some other mid-tier promos like that. If the nagaba eeveelution promotion was really the reason for all this insanity like some are saying, I have a feeling those poncho eevees will soon be out of my reach lol.
Yeah we just sold one of those stamp Pikas for over $700 at auction. $1000 one day soon in this crazy market I guess isn’t crazy. Or $100, who knows ha.
Yes, the opportunity is there. That’s because banks have strict regulators monitoring them compared to your card shops. One deals with traceable cross-border IMTs whilst the card shop uses cash.
AML compliance in a cash-based country like Japan is complex. Is there less oversight for card shops to fill out STRs compared to banks? Probably. Can you imagine the nightmare of dealing with the chain of custody? In Japan, the majority of successful ML-related convictions have evidence that was based on digital remittance, not physical cash. AML prosecution cases against entities are pretty rare over there. Instead, they get “improvement orders”. This is separate from ML prosecution as AML improvement notices are regulatory-based as opposed to criminal litigation.
You know far more than me, but that’s how I would interpret it.
I have real offers of $900 for Umbreon V Alt and $270 for Aroma Lady. A 3x (or more in some cases) this quickly feels unsustainable. I could be wrong, but I feel like the downside risk is a lot higher right now than it should be.
It’s also one of the ugliest and laziest designed “chase” cards ever, the very definition of everything that was wrong with secret rares in Sun & Moon.
Sun & Moon was a really big reset/turning point for the brand so it’s a lot of people’s most important generation. I expect this era of cards to remain outrageous and bizarre as people embrace them specifically because they’re from this era.
I’ve been looking at the PSA10 Mercari sold listings for the past couple of weeks and it looks like some cards came down from their peak a couple of days ago while others continue to climb. But it looks like we’re slowly approaching a turning point.
Eevee Heroes V alt arts peaked at around 120-130k yen, but are now steadly sold at 85k (Umbreon/Leafeon are more expensive) – Espeon VMAX also came down significantly.
Mew V went up to 200k 1-2 days ago (almost double from a week ago), but is now sold for 140k.
Most notably all Acerola related cards (supporter and Mimikyu) keep rising to the point where she might be the #2 waifu after Lillie, even before Marnie or Iono. Her full art card from Climax which is only 1.5 years old, readily available one of the most traded cards right now went up from 100k to 200k and has now passed 300k yen.
The Dream League Mimikyu has reached 150k as well – for a normal CHR! That’s a third of Lillie’s Clefairy which is much rarer (I believe) and was probably 300 USD raw before the big hype began whereas Mimukyu was still extremely affordable (~20-30 raw) just a few weeks ago.
This is pretty insane and probably not sustainable. Wonder if we’ll see a turning point in the next couple of days or if they’ll continue to go up like the Lillie cards (though the Full Force FA also came down recently.
No way these cards are incredibly rare and the price spikes will definitely not bring more to the market there’s no way anyone had binder pages full of duplicates
A lot of Lillie’s Full Force PSA 10s are being listed and they aren’t selling like hot cakes anymore… Looks like the hype train has finally derailed! Still boggles my mind that it went from $500 to $3500 in about 2 months
True, that’s something to consider – though I suspect the number for Mimikyu will rise steeply soon. I guess many people didn’t really think about grading a 2000 yen card.
I suspect there’ll be a surge of new graded cards (or cards purchased from overseas) that will bring down the overall prices in Japan over the next couple of months as awareness for them wasn’t too strong so far. Right now PSA10 versions of modern cards sell for as much as 10x of the price of a NM/M raw card – this at least will definitely change, that’s for sure.
The price gap between eBay sold listings (mostly overseas) and Mercari slowly seems to be closing, too, as sellers outside of Japan have become very aware of the price hike. Almost all graded cards I bought over the past 1-2 weeks are now much harder to obtain for the same price and a bunch of sellers have cancelled my orders as they’ve mysteriously realized they don’t have these cards anymore (sometimes I see them reinsert them a day later for twice the price).
I couldn’t care less where the price of scream promos go but a 2,000 pop is not a lot for a card that popular. When these released, it was pre 2020, and you already had outside interest. I remember one of my buyers was a pen collector who just wanted the scream promos.
Obviously more supply will add downward pressure, but these are s tier popular cards. Same for Mario Pikachu. There are countless cards with much lower pops that Mario Pikachu but it doesn’t matter.
Hint: for those who are familiar with how PSA’s branch in Japan works, there is a return scheduled at the end of this month. Flippers might already be aware of this and trying to figure out how to deal with it though.
