For sure! I’ve been revising eBay listings and went from no sales for almost a month (stagnation) to daily/multiple per week. Most of my inventory is from pre 2020 and beyond, which is why I’m not bothered by current market conditions. I do feel bad for those who started this as a lively hood in the past couple years. While the cards are cute and nostalgic, the market is competitive and unapologetic.
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I will say I have also noticed a general lack of decent cards at many card shows I’ve gone to. When I go, I’m looking for near mint to mint english vintage or modern japanese and a majority of sellers have either english modern and lightly played to heavily played english vintage.
I agree, I think things are pretty stagnant right now and quite frankly, I love it. Take me back to pre 2020 without the crazy hype and hugely fluctuating prices. Helps keep FOMO in check and allows me to enjoy the hobby more naturally.
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I don’t really want to get caught up in the semantics here. Call it stagnation or whatever you want, it doesn’t really change the fact that a lot of people who just deal in what is now the core part of the market are going to be hurt if what I said in the OP ends up being accurate. However you want to brand that doesn’t change the reality.
I would say most people here have more immunity simply because we skew towards less common items. But that’s a minority position. THE Pokemon card market is not us.
A stagnation in the core part of the market affects everyone though. A change in the general sentiment of Pokemon cards changes consumer psychology. People expect prices tomorrow to be less and they stop buying today. Others might see the trend and liquidate today. A lot of it is a self-reinforcing loop.
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I do agree. The overall Pokémon market is not efour. We’re kind of a collector first and for most sorta crowd. That’s why it’s always important to collect what you like. If it all went down to 0 tomorrow I’d still love my cards because they mean something to me
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The real risks come from the many people who’s entire inventory came from 2020 and 2023 purchases. I struggle to think that people in that scenario will fare super well in the coming years no matter what they bought.
I say inventory over collection because many of these people, on top of being overstocked, don’t care about Pokemon enough to weather the storm
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True. I don’t think anyone here is denying the claim. Most members are as you said just collectors who are unaffected, or people that have been around long enough to experience these cycles. E4 literally and figuratively represents the ormb side of the hobby. 
One thing I would add is the stagnation or outright worthlessness of certain cards doesn’t bring down everything. While the market can be connected in a broad sense, the items doing well right now have no correlation to modern chase cards, junk slabs, mystery boxes, etc.
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I started collecting in late 2021 
…
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“Mass produced scarcity” forgot to be scarce. There has been 0 barrier to entry ever since supply chain constraints loosened and grading backlogs cleared, so the ease of sales just from having something available is gone. Since 2020 people have been HUNGRY and that hunger feels like it’s been sated for now.
I’m not surprised to hear local events are cut and paste inventory. Pack fresh modern that anyone can get, junk slabs no one wants, and all the vintage in PSA 5-8 from finding someones closet collection and grading it.
An almost 4 year bull market isn’t anything to scoff at, but corrections and bears show up eventually
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im still hungry,
going back for seconds and thirds
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@pfm , You’ve made some pretty keen observations, but I feel that the effects that we are seeing today are less due to the fluctuations of the Pokemon card market and mostly due to accessibility of cards in today’s market.
The events unfolding today feel no different from 2015-2017, when there were “so many” distributors selling sealed product below MSRP just to make, at best, a profit of a few dollars per transaction. To your point around the number of sellers today, the supply has clearly outpaced demand, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the demand has shrunk (it is definitely possible that demand has shrunk, but currently I do not think we can confidently make that claim).
Because of the many different categories of cards and subsequently varying sale frequencies you mentioned, the better metric to answer the question around the health of the pokemon card market as a whole should be the volume of transactions per annum. At least looking through public data of graded cards, transaction volume has increased year after year since 2019, but the rate of increase per year has decreased since 2021.
cpbog1
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Pokemon starting to be crushed by its own weight.
Adapt or die!!!
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It’s hard to argue that demand in terms of number of market participants has shrunk. I have an intuition it has but that’s far from evidence.
Maybe this data is too general but it’s better than nothing. Interest has fallen between December last year and August this year.
Funny enough that bump back up cooresponds to the Van Gogh release which is pretty wild and shows you how this graph really just captures general worldwide interest.
The two below show people looking for pokemon cards to buy. A slightly different story.
Even if we agree the number of participants in the hobby has not changed, I really do think the amount of dollars per month spent per person has fallen. Which frankly is a more direct measure of what “demand” represents.
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I agree with a lot of the points @pfm made, most importantly the part about how all Pokemon cards are not the same.
I think what a lot of well-informed people have been predicting since 2020 is starting to happen in the modern market. Supply/demand imbalance has reversed to a point where grading literally anything is no longer sustainable, modern box prices are down, the floor on most lower-graded cards has collapsed, and prices are being driven more by availability than pure collectability. We can argue as to the cause of it, either more supply (instagram LLCs, printing to oblivion, grading back to full throttle) or less demand (fewer market participants, less free money in the system, people have less to spend) but the results are the same either way.
A great example of this that hasn’t been mentioned yet is the Japanese modern market and things like VSTAR Universe singles. This is arguably one of the greatest sets of all time, packed with incredible special art cards, shiny Charizard, you name it. @zubat had a great post a month ago where he compared the prices 2 weeks post-release to today. That was a month ago, and prices have fallen even farther since then. Top 3 Pokemon SARs on release day, a month ago, and today:
Charizard Vstar 17,800 → 3,980 → 2980 (83% loss)
Charizard V 8,980 → 2,980 → 1780 (80% loss)
Mewtwo Vstar 11,800 → 2,780 → 1680 (86% loss)
The Radiant Charizard I remember settling at like 1000 yen for awhile, although I could be incorrect. I bought a few in September at 480 yen. I bought more last week at 310 yen. It’s now 220 yen ($1.55 USD), for a shiny Charizard.
So yes, some parts of the market are stagnating. The people who got in on the modern hype train are probably going to get hurt the most as others have pointed out. For many of us with cost basis in pre-2020, we aren’t going to feel it too bad, but it will definitely affect the entire market. Vintage prices seem to be falling as well, although not as much as modern stuff, which I think can be directly tied to the slowdown in the rest of the market and the decline of easy money. You can’t CGC-bulk-grade-Japanese-modern your way to trophy cards anymore.
Personally, I don’t think the last several years were ever going to be sustainable and people who based businesses off of that are in for a rude awakening.
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i’ve only been to one con (galaxy con this year in austin), and as you said, every vender was the same, selling the same crap just as you described. i think that factors into this somehow. an oversaturation of stuff people already have had the chance to buy. nothing new (to buyers) that may tempt them to add to their collection unless the price is too cheap to pass.
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Agree with most everything in this thread. Impossible to know exactly what has caused it, but I’d venture a guess it’s a variety of factors that have come into play in the past year or so:
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The pandemic played a huge role in the rise of all collectibles, and Pokemon cards may have been most impacted of all. As people have adjusted back to the “new normal”, time and spending has gradually shifted back to pre-pandemic hobbies like outdoor/group activities, “revenge travel”, etc. and away from home alone hobbies, like Sunday evenings on ebay bidding on cards.
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The hype has died down from the peak. There is still massive interest in Pokemon and especially the TCG. Just as Pokemon got a huge boost when Go came out in 2016, there was an even bigger spike at the start of the pandemic. The media coverage, levels of demand for products new and old, impact of word of mouth between friends, was all unprecedented in the entire history of Pokemon. That level of craze from 2020-2021 has come down significantly by late 2023. Still higher than pre-2016, and even pre-2020, but not anywhere close to 2020-2021 levels of hype.
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Inflation. People need to pay the rent, buy groceries, start paying student loans again, etc. Can’t buy collectibles / Pokemon cards if you have 0 leftover at the end of the month.
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A huge number of cards printed the last few years. There was massive demand, and TPC responded by printing at unprecedented levels. For a while (think Celebrations launch in late 2021) these massive print runs still couldn’t meet the demand. That’s no longer the case. There were heavily discounted packs for holiday sales this year, You can pretty much get any recently printed set at MSRP with little to no hassle. In the span of 2 years the modern market has gone from extremely under-supplied to a healthy level of supply, or possibly even slightly over-supplied.
Specifically related to #4, but also in general, I believe there are varying levels of “substitution” at play when it comes to Pokemon cards. For someone buying high end trophy cards, PSA 10 1st ed WOTC master sets, etc. obviously there is no possible substitute for those. But for the majority of collectors I suspect there is. I’ve seen countless number of friends who were just excited to get back into collecting Pokemon cards the last few years, who initially get excited about a modern set (Celebrations, Shining Fates, etc.) to then shift their focus to collecting raw LP/MP vintage holos, and then when reasonably priced supply of those was no longer available, started buying cheap modern singles on tcgplayer, etc. Basically they just want to collect something but have a set budget. I’ve done the same, as supply/prices for my main focus became tougher to get/higher priced, I shifted focus to species collecting and between English and Japanese. Same level of enjoyment, but just focused on what was accessible at the time.
The point is, as some parts of the market (sealed modern, most modern singles, modern slabs, and to some extent non-mint vintage) have extremely dropped in terms of demand vs available supply, I believe this also relieves some amount of pressure on other parts of the market, in the case where there is some level of substitution at play.
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To add some context for vstar universe, it received one of the largest prints for a modern set. It’s actually abnormal the amount of vstar printed vs any set right before or after. For example, 151 hasn’t had another proper wave, and it’s been months. Where vstar had another full wave one month after release, along with more supply somewhat recently, which correlates to the single cards price decline.
Anyway not detracting from the overall point, just adding some context as vstar was basically the last set I could get more than 5% of my order from distribution.
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