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.
People (usually teens) who pressure kids into trading when they’re clearly not comfortable. They’re usually the same ones who willingly trade fake cards and just conveniently forget to tell the kid it’s fake (and get pissy when I point it out to them - stay mad jerk).
People who are into this hobby for no reason other than money/investing. Sure, the financial value is a plus, and I use information about that to expand my collection, but people that care about nothing but money make the hobby worse for everyone else.
Honestly, the fact that you can’t open EX Series sealed product anymore (unless you have endless money–in which case, more power to you). When I came back to Pokemon in late 2019 after a ~13 yr hiatus, it was pretty expensive to open EX product, but not prohibitively so. You could buy a 3-pack blister or a tin from eBay for a couple hundred bucks and have the time of your life.
But now the prices are literally 10x higher. I can no longer open EX product without feeling guilty over how fiscally irresponsible it is.
I long for a return of the days of wowlootsellers’s $150 tins. But I’m not sure we’ll ever return to that, and it makes me genuinely sad. It’s a really incredible experience as an adult to open the sets you grew up with. It’s such a shame that this experience is now as expensive as it is.
As an aside: If there’s a silver lining to all of the people “investing” in modern sealed product nowadays, it’s that the kids growing up with the current sets will have plenty of affordable product to open when they’re adults. I wish that the 2004 equivalent of crypto bros had hoarded TMTA boxes for us gen-3ers to open when we grew up .
The same people who mocked me in school for liking Pokémon are now messaging me as if we’re friends. We only crossed paths in school because you bullied me, and now you want to turn that into an opportunity to profit for yourself.
The worst part of this hobby isn’t scalpers or investors; it’s the scammers. Nothing ruins the experience more than having your trust broken by someone, whether they’re a new face or someone you’ve dealt with before, and this is true for both buyers and sellers.
I don’t necessarily get angry, but I do get frustrated sometimes. Recently I’ve been searching for a specific Japanese promo in a PSA 10. I set up multiple eBay alerts and was constantly checking Mercari Japan, Yahoo Auctions, and eBay. (There is 1 on ebay as a BIN but the price is too high for me) However one day I checked the PSA cert records for the card again and saw that one had sold on eBay just a couple of weeks ago for less than what I would’ve paid at auction. The last one that sold before then was a year ago before that>.< Frustrating that i somehow managed to miss the whole week it was up for auction..
I’ve really just about had it with the gambling gamification of the hobby. It was one thing to rip packs at MSRP. Super low cost of entry. But the entire hobby has become diseased by it. People paying ludicrously over MSRP so a WhatNot streamer can open for them and then never send the pull. People buying mystery packs because they have to get their fix somehow. Straight up gambling sites where you can “score” random slabbed cards. We’re even at the point where people are buying those ridiculous Silver/Gold/Ruby tier slab packs and opening random slabs for like 300 a pop.
Gambling is a complete and utter sickness that’s tearing this hobby as well as sports cards apart.
I would say for me it’s the overall/current state of modern collecting. I’ve only dabbled in it compared to vintage, but I feel like within a very short time you can be priced out of it so quickly. I don’t mean that I can’t afford it, but that the market literally decides within days when a set is ‘strong’ or ‘weak’, and then the supply becomes a problem pretty much until it’s sold out/scalped away.
It seems that even the LGS’s are increasingly in on it, artificially limiting supply or sales.. and even if they cap the amount of product people can buy, they’re still controlling the supply based off demand and other market factors going on. I get that they want to make money or have to make money.. but I feel bad for anyone either just trying to play the game as opposed to strict collecting or ‘investing’, but then also if you’re a young kid trying to get into Pokemon it must seem expensive or unfair at times. I just don’t think you should have to take out a loan or setup a bot to buy some of these cards, but I really feel it’s getting this way more and more over time.
Overall, it just seems kind of fake to me. When I look at the vintage market, I totally get why certain cards/sets have become so valuable over time. They faced more natural attrition, were destroyed/lost or that some sets had lower supply due to dwindling demand, etc. But now everything just feels a whole lot less organic to me, and I just don’t know if it’s sustainable.
In one way I’m happy that people are excited to willing to drop the money on modern, but I can’t help but wonder sometimes where it’s all going to end up or if it will become increasingly ‘toxic’ over time even compared to the past few years. So all in all it kind of just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.. even though I do enjoy a lot of the cards that have come out of modern the past while.
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