This is total bs, no crypto gacha makes 10 figures, not even close
All crypto card related coins and projects are all down -90% and pokemon yapping is also down that same percentile since q3 last year. Name a single big respected crypto channel or KOL shilling cards right now. My feed is empty and i been deeply involved in this space since 2015
Reddit is larp central. Truly the worst place to quote from to make a point
Besides, generally speaking you cannot compare the 2. The difference between a crypto bubble and pokemon is that pokemon has actual real genuine demand behind the speculation unlike crypto which is musical chairs since the very start, except for bitcoin which is partially a money laundering / offshore / gold alternative asset, but every other altcoin? 0. Nfts? 0.
I see a ton of fear consistently reported around the gambling repack ecosystem. But I wonder how often we stop to look at these products for their own merits in relation to the actual booster pack.
Just off the dome thoughts and observations, but if the conventional logic that opening packs is a suckers game and big smart guys buy singles, shouldnāt we love these repacks? Better EV for the consumer, better cards, more transparency, same long-term upsides. The secondary market is benefiting from a stronger option for selling that is both paying more and providing higher liquidity. Candidly, the only people that I can think of that would have reason to be existentially concerned would be:
Flippers who are no longer competitive because they canāt match the margin suppression that the repackers are willing to participate in.
I suppose the counterargument might be that with a booster pack, itās so difficult to get ahold of one that you canāt fully succumb to addiction in a short window of time and blow through all of your financial resources with the click of a button. I agree with that in the context of addicts, but also know that we complain about the hurdles of getting the packs, too. Haha.
It surprises me that we are existentially worried that, arguably, a material improvement in conditions for a broad swath of people has brought bubble armageddon to our front steps.
This is not a first principles breakdown, this is AI slop. If everyone is hoping for a bubble to burst, only so they can buy more, the bubble would immediately re-inflate.
Agree with your first part, but not necessarily with the second part. Markets would never cool off if that were the case. When people see a bubble burst, it hits their psyche and many run for the hills which in turns softens the demand.
It depends how lindy the asset class is. If labubus burst tomorrow then there is little historical data to show if it was once in a lifetime fad or a cyclical correction.
Pokemon is lindy, it has 30 years of hard data, and hence why every dip gets bought up by people in the know. The market is a wealth transfer from the impatient to the patient IF the asset class is fundamentally sound & lindy
Labubus arenāt, nfts arent, most ai slop startups arent, 99.9999% altcoins arent
Luxury vintage watches? Certain oldtimers & sportscars? Ancient coins? Precious metals? Pokemon? The sp500? Bitcoin? Absolutely are
Why? Because there is hard data on them, historical cycles, lindy effect
I mostly agree with what youāre saying. The one thing I partially disagree with is the ā30 yearsā thing. It has only had 6 years of significant exponential growth that would make it an attractive alternative asset for people outside of the hobby. 10 if you ignore the liquidity problems pre-2020 (and the fact that it was only BARELY outerperforming the S&P from 2016-2019) since the buyer pool was significantly smaller back then.
Also, Iām still waiting for the Waifus bubble to not burst and people to buy every dip like you said, oh no I guess it bursted years ago and now you can find a Shiny Star Mary for peanuts.
We also saw Pokemon get hit hard in 2022-2023 for a lot of cards and sealed from various eras once the market hit a downturn. Objectively speaking, Pokemon has barely had boom periods throughout its history. Only in recent years.
When i say 30 years of hard data i mean literally everything involving pokemon. The reach & impact the entire franchise generated for each generation. All time revenue of 12 figures, the animes, the video games, the entire picture is important when evaluating and making an investment thesis for the tcg
Highest grossing entertainment media franchise of all time with one of the most powerful intergenerational nostalgic marketing loops ever created
God I canāt wait to give these plastic slabs to my kids one day. Probably will have pulled another 100x once they turn 18. Easy money
And how many people now are telling us that this is the new normal and boxes will NEVER be under $200 again? Back then we were definitely well into fear on the fear/greed index. Now, weāre certainly at the apex of greed.
Right now it looks extremely bullish with the amount of money sloshing around and the level of confidence in this market, but we donāt know what the future holds. No one truly knows anything in an alternative asset market where the only real driver of value is the publicās confidence that the prices will continue to rise.
This board is usually the only pokemon related place i look up but i was on reddit about a month ago and the opinions were quite binary
The people like you mentioned but also people saying its the most obvious bubble about to burst since dotcom
Besides, i think, the people who actually really move the needle on high end cards do not post their bull copium on social media. They just buy and vault it up and go on with their day. Atleast in my experience.
99% of reddit consists of threads like "why did this 100$ single go up, will it go up more? āShould i buy or sell this card i am up 100$ nowā
It is all just noise imo. Maybe you can draw some conclusions about (ultra) modern & sealed from those sentiments but not for the vintage market imo and personally i am only truly bullish on vintage (for the most part with few exceptions)
Iād argue that used to be true, but Iām honestly not so sure thatās the case anymore. The guy who bought the 236k Bubble Mew HEAVILY publicized it on social media, for instance. As did the guy who bought the JP PSA10 Gold Star Rayquaza.
I agree on vintage. I am very bullish on vintage/mid era - both TCG and video games. Iām unsure on modern (XY/SM) and very skeptical on ultramodern (SwSh-onward). But i donāt know. Weāre in uncharted territory now. This bull market has been going on for 1.5 years, and so many people from outside the hobby have been coming in as a moneymaking venture.
I have tried to explicitly not claim āeverything is a bubbleā or āPokemon will crash.ā Instead, I tried identifying a layered structure, where we have an organic demand floor (which I agree with the bullish posters is real and durable, particularly for vintage), a speculative overlay sitting on top, and structural features (engineered scarcity, grading-churn absorption, participant leverage) that make the system more fragile than headline prices could suggest. This fragility is not the same as imminent collapse, which is why I made that last remark at the end of the original post about predicting timing.
I think the Lindy argument by @RoyalOak could be the strongest counter raised here, but it cuts more narrowly than itās being deployed. Pokemon-the-franchise is unambiguously Lindy (30 years, highest-grossing media IP), but Pokemon-as-investable-asset-class has roughly 6ā10 years of meaningful data, as @CardboardInsanity noted. So we cannot and should not conflate the two. The fact that vintage recovered from 2022ā2023 is real evidence for vintage durability, which I mentioned at the start may hold up best in any correction. However itās much weaker evidence that modern sealed at current prices is similarly Lindy.
@CardboardInsanity question about adjacent Pokemon assets (plushies, amiibos, sealed video games, anime merch) is the one Iād most like to see the bullish side answer, because if the bull case is āPokemon brand strengthā then those should all be moving, but they arenāt, which suggests the TCG-specific dynamics (grading ecosystem, social media narrative, sealed-product scarcity engineering) are doing more of the work than franchise fundamentals.
Yeah, I have heard a few vendors say they are bringing more slabs to shows because they WILL sell; Either to buyers or to the re-packers for the mystery packs as a last resort/end of show scenario. I donāt really have a problem with the mystery slab packs, but it does pray on the gambler mentality, which has been around since the beginning of time. Iām not a fan myself, but a person is free to spend their money however they want, IMO. Just another factor feeding into this current frenzy.
