there are aspects qualitativly different from evolving skies outside of the set itself
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covid times people were having loans paused, rent paused, and being given free money. Many people were straight up scamming PPP loans from the US government. Usually for the amount of $20,000, and it wasn’t even hard. Massive amounts of fraud, and free money and debt and payment forgiveness.
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Right now people are poor. Jobs are scarce, %99 of the job growth recovery went to foreign imports. The inflationary impact from when evolving skies time has hit us now, so your money doesn’t even go as far. People are spending more of the % of their money on the basics. People are in massive debt.
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pokemon was dealing with having to suddenly learn how to ramp up their printing capacity in 2020. As well as that, supply chains were frustrated due to many restrictions and genuine uncertainty of many people if its wise to be at work at all. Again, many people were begging their bosses to fire them so that they could get more money from government hand outs than from actually working. The incentives were topsy turvey.
The real question to ask here, is what will Pokemon Company actually decide to do? They clearly to date have been doing a poor job at communicating across the company and matching and managing expectations and managing their card printing and distribution of cards in many ways. I won’t go into that here though. But they clearly are caught with their pants down right now.
As far as the set itself? I think much of it was a massive mistake. I hated masterballs in 151 and I hate them now. In Japanese it was a very low pull rate with a massive number of cards it can be a variant for. 1/20 in JP is way way way too rare. In english its even worse because now there are 3 types of reverse holo variant, which will dilute the pull rates of all 3 types. Also of note is that in English the pull rates went from ~2 SIR per booster box at the start of the era, down to ~1 to now about ~.5 !!! In terms of odds that is like ~1/65 or something based on the numbers we’ve seen since the last pull rate nerf in Temporal forces. So now you add that to the insane numbers of SIRs in this set, and it dillutes the pull rates of desirable cards even further. That is a massive mistake. In japanese the terastal festival SAR pull rate is locked in to be one per box at least. So that is 1/10 packs. And yet still the set is wildly popular and prices of the desirable cards is quite high due to the sheer number of SIR cards in the set. In that sense, the pull rate matches the sheer number of cards you can get.
I must admit, from the numbers, this was a mistake. I think the masterballs in this set of all sets was entirely a mistake. If they wanted to bring out that artificial scarcity gimmick, they should have done it on a weak set with a small set list…oh wait we had one it was called shrouded fable.
Will this be another evolving skies? Well, if surging spark is vivid voltage 2.0, then I have no reason to say this isn’t going to be like evo skies.
Due to the aforementioned “meta” circumstances pokemon company should be able to do something more. The question is do they want to? As of yet, they haven’t really done reprinting for the s/v era at all, instead they kept going back to reprint sword and shield era cards, especially crown zenith until they flooded us with packs. Now, those sets at the time were still in competitive rotation, but even as recently as this christmas they reprinted the trainer gallery sets for big retail.
I cannot divine what pokemon is doing with their print facility time and effort. Nor do I know if they communicate well to anticipate demand. We got meager reprints of 151 trickled out to us via big box stores for the holiday(which got botted as you’d expect), LGS were left in the trash bind entirely.
At this point I’m just brain dumping, so I’ll end it here.
