The Question of the Day is a way to facilitate community discussion to help members ponder the unanswered questions of the world that are somehow relating to the hobby. Questions are many times open ended and up to interpretation. Feel free to post your thoughts in as much or as little detail as you’d like.
Helpful Considerations may or may not help some people focus their answer, these are blurred to not bother those who have their own ideas.
Yes, of course. People can collect for different reasons, nothing wrong with that! More than nostalgia I would say it’s important to have some passion, maybe a desire to appreciate artworks, and being open to learn or contribute positively to the hobby.
It’s not “sustainable” (or to better say, it’s dumb) to come here with dollar-sign eyes, and start purchasing expensive cards you don’t understand, only because some online newspaper said Charizard is beating the SP500, or your grandma heard that Kabuto is king.
In that case, it’s better to take a breath and start slowly.
The shocking answer to this has mostly been “yes”, depending on what you bought and when you actually bought in. There’s only a few key moments recently where things got really insanely valued (Covid, Logan Paul, etc) and many cards still haven’t necessarily reached that peak pricing again ($1000+ Jungle Pikachu, $100K+ Neo Genesis Lugia, etc). This means you would have potentially bought the ‘top’ on many items if you went all in during these times and it wouldn’t have worked out very well (maybe it would someday, who knows).
With this said, I think having zero knowledge at all could severely cripple the outcomes as well. Like if you had no idea that Charizard or Lugia or Pikachu are some of the most desired cards, you could potentially miss out on massive gains as well if you went ‘all in’ on less popular Pokemon cards.
So overall, it’s not necessarily a ‘requirement’ to have childhood nostalgia/memories and start collecting or learning about the hobby. But it definitely gives you a big head start because ultimately a lot of the nostalgia and memories is what has driven the value of many Pokemon cards over time, in addition to other collecting factors.
Nostalgia adds an affection and warmth to the experience of collecting. However, collecting itself is a fundamental human activity: an act of curation of the things we find beautiful in the world around us.
As with all things we elect to do in life, we can expect push-and-pull factors from every direction that make it more or less viable for us to be entrenched in this particular hobby. The best anchor in these waves is not nostalgia, which has more to do with the color of our participation than the nature of it, but rather the individual progress from infatuation to embedded meaning-making. The best predictor of sustained, meaningful engagement is this personal transition. We all start with a spark of interest that feels consuming, exciting, and new. Eventually, we find that participating in the hobby makes part of our lives more meaningful. The hobby embeds itself in the rhythm of how we think about cards, days, time, and friendship.
It does not matter when you start collecting or why. The hobby is extremely accessible. It only matters that you’ve found the rhythm and attuned to it. That the seed of card culture and all that might grow in you over time has begun to root. Nostalgia is a wonderful fertilizer for the soil.
I don’t think you need to have been into the hobby since you were a kid to really appreciate a collection at a high level. You can come in later and still enjoy it just as much. That said, I do think growing up with it helps a lot. Having those memories, the nostalgia, and the context around the cards adds an extra layer that’s hard to replicate. It changes how you see certain sets, artworks, and even small details that might go unnoticed otherwise.
I was a kid playing and ripping wotc when it came out after red and blue. Mainly played gold and silver on gb color.
I feel absolutely no nostalgia towards pokemon cards. I mean Zero.
Got into collecting with tcg pocket so October 2024. I’m balls deep in it now. But there is nothing early wotc in my collection because I think they are bad art wise and basically what came after is better in every possible objective way. Absolute zero cards of my childhood in my present collection. I may make an exception for the ancient mew, I have nice memories of that one.
Seeing so many people biased with the nostalgia prism makes me wonder if there is something wrong with me. There must be, because I’m not immune to nostalgia in other domains. Maybe I have just bad memory.
You sound like my brother . He couldn’t care less about his childhood collection so I bought it from him. I couldn’t believe it so I graded his best cards and gave them back to him thinking he would appreciate it. He just tossed em in a dresser. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just different strokes for different folks.
Prior experience or nostalgia is not a requirement to enjoy Pokemon collecting. It may color the emotions and memories that we attach to our items, but those same emotions and memories can be formed in present day as well.
. He couldn’t care less about his childhood collection so I bought it from him. I couldn’t believe it so I graded his best cards and gave them back to him thinking he would appreciate it. He just tossed em in a dresser. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just different strokes for different folks.