The problem I find with grading is that it’s less about the card and more about the grade this is why I don’t collect slabs I like simpler times when I was a kid and nobody cared about condition as long as the card is in mediocre condition nobody cared also I hope ARS expands to north America someday I love how their slab focuses less on the label and more on the card
8 Likes
I’m enjoying it a lot, but the things i focus on have changed somewhat. I rarely ever open modern anymore, mainly due to the increased pricing and the terrible pull rates. Celebrations was one of the biggest highlights of the last few years because you could actually pull cool cards. The chase has gotten progressively worse and worse as times gone on. It is absolutely crazy to me that you can have cards take multiple thousands of packs to pull. Thats insane. As such, I basically avoid modern packs with exceptions for good deals (costco/sams bundles for example).
I’m drawn to the special sets mostly, but even those are lacking as of late. Bad rates and seemingly half assed attempts at making the set interesting. Just feels like its not worth my time for them. Im sure ill buy the next one though…
I did a deep dive into species collecting the last 6 months or so and thats been really fun. I see myself continuing there in the near future.
Ive shifted to singles buying and have much more fun with that.
I think collecting is still in a great place. I just wish modern pull rates were better. Thats my only real complaint at the moment.
10 Likes
A lot of fun I had at the beginning of my collecting journey was buying collections.
Picking up a lot on Kijiji (Canada’s Craigslist), keeping some cards, selling others.
Later, this evolved to picking up collections on mercari and filtering the cards the same way.
Looking back at my personal experiences, this has always been my favorite part.
Nowadays, I have not been able to find collections that give me this joy as often as I used to. They are either impossible to find or overpriced.
I would blame this on the mainstream consciousness of pokemon. Everyone thinks they’re cards hold a lot of value and they try to maximize it.
But I still find ways to enjoy. Recently I started going to my local league to play and trade. I used to do this in 2018, so it’s nice to repeat it again. I’m very excited to go to my first prerelease in 7 years (these are my favorite TCG events).
I think it makes sense for humans to vary our focus on things in our lives. It will allow us to enjoy more experiences.
12 Likes
I have strange collecting goals, and I collect cards that can be played or even damaged so for me I’m always finding interesting new stuff. Error collecting is also super fun in that even with everyone combing you still find crazy things. Whether it’s a 2$ card, a 10,000 card, or even some little toy or postcard or Clearfile, or sticker I almost always feel like a happy little kid when I find something new and I’m lucky to still have that feeling.
Here is a Krabby I found last week I thought was insanely cool
56 Likes
normally miscuts aren’t the coolest thing to me. But the back of it showing the pattern of the sheet is actually pretty neat. Excellent find.
edit: actually wth post that stuff in the recent picks ups thread! That would get easy likes. EASY!
9 Likes
I am a full timer now and enjoying my time engaging in the hobby as a business. I think a lot of silly and unsustainable things are going on, but trying to optimize navigating through it is fun. Lots of moving parts. Been 3.5 years now full time and don’t see me getting done with it any time soon, though I have already changed what I have been doing multiple times to adjust to new realities in the market.
As far as collecting the cards go, I can’t justify the costs personally. Collecting chapter for me is over (maybe will come back someday). Market just universally values stuff more than I do. Have a set amount of each set I open with my kids, seeing their joy building their binders is a fun way to engage still.
Playing pokemon pocket with my son as he starts to learn some of the tcg itself, seeing their sitting cutie/build a bear/plushie collections of pokemon they engage with every day. Taking down some mega tyranitars tonight as a family in PoGo. All things considered I am in my favorite season of Pokemon engagement ever. Albeit very different from past seasons.
31 Likes
I dont feel that way, but the amount of purely money focussed investorbros seems to be growing. Just like the amount of scammers, but i’ll just pretend not to see them and enjoy my own journey
11 Likes
Wtf this is crazy
10 Likes
I definitely feel like things are changing, in many ways for the worse, but I am enjoying the hobby more recently than in the past.
I purposefully avoid social media, so my main interactions with collectors are on E4 and the discord. E4 especially is a very positive place, things like Secret Santa and the signature exchange and the Who’s that e4 Member! thread are really great things which I feel like only happen here. I miss the signature events and other ways to meet up with people in person, but I’m hoping to make it out to worlds this year to catch back up on that.
While prices for modern are going up a lot, prices for most of my collection goals are remaining relatively reasonable. Even with modern going up, outside of Prismatic Evolutions most things are still attainable. It’s nothing like the 2020 era boom where I was forced to give up several long-term goals which I had my heart set on.
I’m excited to buy things, excited to interact with fellow collectors, and excited to see what the future brings.
28 Likes
On a personal level, not so much anymore. Late 2019 and late 2020 were the periods where I had collecting fatigue the most, due to the floodgate of releases and increasing prices (more info in this related thread: Collecting Fatigue - #34 by Quuador). But since I’ve completed some of my collection sub-goals and also adjusted my Pikachu collection sub-goal to make it more manageable (in terms of quantity at least), collecting and searching online just takes less time, giving me more time for other stuff in my life. I’ve also been extremely lucky in buying my house thanks to Pokémon, despite being single in today’s housing market, which also helped a lot for my mental state.
Also, I’ve been collecting a lot of different things in my life, but I’ve found that the most important part about keeping a collection fun and engaging is the community, which here on Efour is one of the best there is. 
It cannot be overstated, imo!
In general however: yes, it’s absolutely more difficult to find joy. Not just in the hobby per se, although the fiasco with the fake playtest (which quite a few fellow Efour members and friends of mine bought); the fights at Costco; the increasing amount of fake cards and autographs; the overall scalpers/flippers/investors and other people that only care about money instead of collecting or Pokémon; the prices of modern cards that keep increasing and increasing (and pull rates that keep dropping, I might add); etc. etc. sometimes really sucks the joy out of things.
Also, just social media has become more toxic and non-human in general these last few years. This defintely was already the case for a while, but I feel like the pandemic only accelerated that. Maybe I’ve been reading and watching the wrong type of social media, but I feel like people are way less emphatic these days. A lot of people are also stressed out about money. Mostly because everything has become more expensive (from Pokémon cards to houses; from groceries to rent; from cars to basic furniture and electronic devices), while the amount most people earn with their jobs have percentage-wise barely increased to compensate that.
I also feel like a lot of people are influenced way too much by social media. Whether it’s scams; click-bates; minorities with too loud voices; etc. I don’t want to go too much off-topic, but people are butt-hurt over everything these days and in general seem to become increasingly more stupid, and it’s honestly pretty tiring. I sometimes feel more and more like a boomer, even though I’m technically an early millennial.
Anyway, back to Pokémon: it’s sometimes good to take a step back. Think about the things that do give you joy right now, and focus on those. Also, the Pokémon hobby doesn’t necessarily have to be collecting. Maybe it’s fun to play some of the Pokémon games? Maybe it’s fun to re-watch some of the first Pokémon anime for nostalgia sake. Maybe it’s fun to just watch funny Pokémon-related videos on YT, and skip all the pack openings and investment videos. Maybe it’s fun to learn and play the Pokémon TCG game. Etc. (Although tbf, I’ve never played any of the Pokémon Games nor the TCG myself, so can’t really give advice or comment on that regard. 
)
Here also some related threads:
What do you do when you are in a slump?
Collecting post-2020 is on hard mode (Smpratte video)
Collecting Fatigue
Why Pokemon Cards Stopped Being Fun - OkJLUV Discussion
I hit a collecting slump
Are you content with your collection?
Greetz,
Quuador
41 Likes
I got back in in 2020 so these cycles haven’t seemed as drastic to me as I’m sure they have for a lot of y’all that have been here for so long. I’ve said it a million times here but I’d love to go back and collect pre-2020. I read old posts here or watch old YouTube videos and the atmosphere was so different, just people chillin and talking about cards because they liked it.
My biggest frustration is just how expensive stuff is. I’m lucky to have a well paying job but even then a lot of stuff I want is just unattainable. And I’m not talking trophies or anything crazy, just some promos and set cards.
I also intentionally stay pretty isolated. I hang out here and a small handful of discord servers, watch a very small number of YouTube channels and that’s about it. I’m intentionally ignorant 
15 Likes
Interesting to the the range in specifically what is dragging people, despite it seeming to be a common experience. I avoided an explanation in the OP avoid framing the “problem” in any specific way.
Interesting that the “solution” seems to be pretty much the same for people who weighed in. To either step away or shrink your exposure to the hobby to a small sphere of whatever it is you enjoy. It’s good advice.
I did ask if it was “increasingly” difficult because I recognize that there will always be pockets of joy. I have just found personally that the ratio of positive experiences to negative experiences has taken a turn for the worse and it’s especially true if I step outside the curated bubble.
To sum it up, if I randomly bumped into someone who collected graded cards prior to (roughly) 2021 - I would probably be super excited and eager to talk to them. Whereas today, I might not even bring up the fact that I have a collection.
48 Likes
It was fun for awhile and no one can take that away from us! Once people started trying to convert it from a hobby to a primary revenue stream we saw so much splintering amongst the bigger hobbyists-turned-merchants. Pal’s you’d hang out with in discords becoming enemies…
Many dozens of different small-batch cliques forming that could no longer seem to get along due to competition, ego clashes, drama.
Things got better, and then worse, with regionals & art signing events. It felt really cool getting to meet artists and it was extremely exciting to get your cards signed while exploring cities with new friends…
and then the great Fiverr/Craigslist/Instagram muling scourge began and the inability for artists/organizers to figure out a way to meet demand by limiting signatures/sketches/time-per-fan in line over a weekend meant that more people showed up disappointed than happy. I think that was sort of the beginning of the end.
The different unique stuff popping up was super interesting but each item just lead to more drama and bickering on what was fair game to collect and what was stigmatized. Fighting over cards graded vs “NFC”. Fighting over if a card was an extra copy or was distributed officially. Fighting over what grading company to grade with or auction house to buy from. Fighting about what streamer you can support or current event you can talk about. Now we have literal fraud that might go all the way to the tippity top of the pokemon TCG mountain! It’s been a wild ride but fatigue sets in and the best way to deal with it is with little breaks until you can find your joy again. Wishing everyone the best as they deal with different mental hurdles in their own way.
12 Likes
This has been especially surreal
13 Likes
If money was no object, I think I’d have a very unchanging relationship with the hahbee.
Buy booster boxes → open booster boxes → enjoy the cards → rinse and repeat → all while not engaging in the social aspect of the hahbee which for the most part has always been complete garbage and nothing but a weight to carry.
Since money is an object, there’s not much left to do besides caballing. 
14 Likes
I was recently talking to someone who has been very close to the recent scandal, and has possibly lost over $100,000 about this feeling. Basically what I said was that when people talk about the state of the world we live in, weird fraud by people who already have so much more than others really shines through as a terrible example of where we are.
Truthfully the scandal has made me feel a bit sad recently, and I’m not even financially hit by it, so I can understand if that feeling is prevailing on here especially among people that lost money. It just adds an extra layer of bleakness beyond the behavior of collectors and resellers and other types of scammers that are out there right now.
8 Likes
I miss the days of opening a box and then going to eBay to buy what I was missing. Would steer away from the pricey playable cards until they fell out of circulation. It was such a simple time.
13 Likes
I still enjoy collecting nearly as much as I did during the 1999–2004 era. One of the main reasons for this is that I have neither the time nor the interest to engage with Instagram, YouTube, or other platforms related to the hobby.
Discovering E4 a few years ago was a true eye-opener. Before that, my impression of the hobby—shaped by YouTube, Reddit, and similar spaces—was that many participants weren’t exactly the most thoughtful individuals. In my view, the intellectual gap and tone between E4 and the mainstream/modern collecting discourse is enormous.
Without E4, I might have concluded that this hobby was only for a particular type of person. While I only have time to read it occasionally, E4 remains a crucial factor in my continued enjoyment of collecting.
15 Likes
Yeah, I’m definitely feeling demotivated.
Maybe it’s partially winter hitting me with the SAD but I’ve temporarily lost interest except for keeping up with reveals since I don’t want to dive back in and find I missed a set I enjoy.
Been picking up cheaper trainers and such but just getting irritated that every time I look, prices increase and I’ve got lots of expenses w planning a trip and saving for a house - so, minimal collecting money and my current needs for my sets are expensive (but should still be done later this year).
YouTube feed dominated by investor videos, some other discords the same types, people obsessively discussing their “sealed collection” and “portfolio” like I need joy around me, not just within me.
Your expose on most of the prototypes being fake (excellent work BTW) , tremendous price increases, the obsession with the hobby solely as a get rich quick scheme or investment and seeing people with zero interest outside of quick quids all around are some of the reasons why I’m so deflated.
In terms of being prices rising, I had arranged a pretty big purchase, in fact my biggest ever by far from a friend for the summer which I probably can’t afford anymore and the last card I need for neo destiny in an 8 is £1200.
Opening product feels crap now too - sets are too big to master yourself and if I open it I know I’m just losing money on basically anything.
E: as an aside I suppose a lot of what I’m collecting now due to a large break from properly collecting, is stuff many of you purchased or were able to purchase for your collections very cheaply back in the day.
I’ve had many chats with Lasbrisas where he cannot believe the prices I’m having to pay for random set cards and the like.
For many years I’d just buy the odd random pack, and remember Viral messaging me over the years asking if I wanted random Poncho boxes and things as they released and saying no due to whatever the reason was at the time.
Feels silly looking back now but can’t live in the past, haha.
13 Likes
Breaks are the best. Took one for basically a year and a half. Highly recommend.
11 Likes