Just wondering considering 90% of discussion here is always on WOTC sets.
Can you see any of these being valuable in the future (~10 years time)?
i.e. Rainbow Rare Charizard, Rainbow Rare Tapu Lele, Gold Solagelo, Gold Lunala
I think there will be a few of those that will retain SOME value, mostly the popular pokemon like charizard, or the playable ones like tapu lele, lucario, zoroark, etc … for the others? I doubt it. And even the charizard is limited due to the huge amounts available. They’re nowhere near as hard to pull as they should be, and there’s over 400 graded in a 10 already. The biggest problem I think is just that there’s way too many of them.
I could definitely see the Charizard being worth more but that’s just because Charizards always have that collectibility aspect to them. 10, 20, 30 years from now you will still have Charizard collectors just like Pikachu collectors will always exist, they are just very well known cards. As for the others, I think they will become a very niche category, for example I know some collectors that collect a specific Pokémon plus Shining Pokémon or GX Pokémon etc etc.
So will I think they will rise in price over time? Definitely, Holos, full arts, secret rares always go up in price and I don’t think that will change with the newer sets after some time as passes. However I do believe some cards with rise more in price than others just due to them being popular cards.
However this is just my two cents and we can’t really know if they are worth investing in until it’s too late.
Mjisaacs
I do like and collect some of the rainbow cards and I think they are really appealing. I think there will always be some latent demand for them.
BUT we live in a time with cheap product, mass produced to oblivion with tons of adult collectors preserving and grading cards. Just look at the population of PSA 10s on these cards. The prices on some of the more popular rainbow Pokémon in PSA 10 are already higher than I’m willing to pay.
My guess is you’ll see the population of these cards rise and rise and the demand will begin to dwindle as the cards rotate out of the card game and the sun and moon era becomes old and uncool.
Maybe when these cards become “vintage” you’ll see another climb in price but I think just the sheer amount of mint product will really put a low ceiling on the prices the cards can reach.
Of course this is my own speculation and I could be totally wrong.
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I don’t think pull rates are the issue here, Rainbow Rares are still ridiculously hard to pull. It’s just that literally the very moment the set is released people are already sending cards to PSA. If people back then were grading pokemon cards as vigorously as they do now, I think shinings, GS and Crystal populations would be almost as big.
The cards could still have a future though, it’s just that they might not get huge premiums as graded cards.
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the pull rates combined with the insane amounts printed mean there’s TONS out there though. And you have people buying whole cases and opening them no sweat. The sheer amount kinda defeats the whole rarity purpose.
How do you know if too many have been printed?Look at Charizard GX hyper rare, while there’s a lot of 10s out there only about 700 cards have been submitted. This doesn’t really show that too many have been printed, only that the card is easy to grade.
I understand that there’s a lot on ebay right now but it’s still a relatively new card. Only 10s are going down, but raw copies are consistently selling well, and if that continues the price will eventually go up. Cards are only overprinted when there’s not enough demand keeping them selling. It’s just too early to say that these cards have been printed too much.
The thing is that there’s only really a big demand for that charizard though. Not so much for most of the other cards in that set. People have been buying tons and tons just because of that charizard, and tpci is still printing them. The whole reason why lots of cards are valuable is in big part due to rarity and scarcity. The only thing that is currently driving up the price for the rr charizard is “it’s a freaking charizard that people hyped up” but with the huge print runs and people buying cases upon cases of booster boxes just cause of that charizard, there’s tons of them. And tpci only really cares about they themselves making money, so they’re happy enough to be printing more if needed. Unlike other charizards that came in much smaller print runs in a time when people didn’t buy cases upon cases of specific sets, I believe the RR charizard doesn’t really have anything to back up its supposed value appart from “it’s a charizard”.
Not to say that it will not have any value in the future, but I don’t believe the prices will be going up by a lot any time soon.
Then again noone can really tell the future, and any hype around new cards’ future values is all speculation. But it won’t be the next base set zard or the next shining zard for sure.
There’s also the issue that because so much product is opened for those zards and other chase cards, that there’s also an ample steady supply of the other less desirable cards, wich doesn’t really help the values of those.
Cards become valuable when they’re playable and in rotation, or when they’re hard to get. Currently most of those RRs are neither.
@pkmnflyingmaster
I think the question is talking about when the cards become “vintage” 10-20 years down the road so I completely agree with everything you said.
Mjisaacs
What you’re describing is nothing new, it’s natural for charizard to start off as the most or only valuable card in a set. It was almost the same for shinings, gold stars and crystals for awhile after their release. The interest could easily shift to the other hyper rares in due time. It hasn’t even been a year since Burning Shadows was released, so I wouldn’t say the print run is huge just yet.
Also rarity maybe important but hardly the main reason for cards being valuable. For example 1st ed Base Set Charizard isn’t that rare at all, it’s just that the demand is that strong. Being playable only adds short term value to a card because it won’t be playable forever. It’s all about whether these cards appeal to collectors and I think it’s too early to decide. I can agree that they’ll never be in the same realm as Base Set and shinings but they still have some decent potential nonetheless.
Well it’s what I believe, and I’m not exactly the only one to think this way 
but neither of us can look into the future so we can only tell the OP what we think the answer is to a question is about the future. Wether it’s too early to decide or not, the OP is in fact asking the question either way, so I answered according to what I think will happen. No more, no less. There’s really not much point in trying to argue if neither of us can see the future.
That’s fine, I respect your opinion. I’m not saying you’re wrong to have it, just saying why I disagree with some of it.
I’ve 24 hyper 10’s and eventually will go for the set. This is purely for my tastes rather than investment reasons. That said they are around at the time of the latest boom so you would have to think that they will have a nostalgic impact on the kids of today. So in 15 years you just never know. Problem that counters that is the hype to grade these days. So there will never be another wotc nostalgic chase purely because so many will be graded over the next many years.
Interestingly there is also a snobbery towards modern cards so that may also impact them. Less hyped hypers now may find they do better long term than say the more hyped (charizard) of today, purely because there wasn’t as much of a push to grade the lesser hyped cards during their print. But that is speculation so any chase for hypers shouldn’t be looked at as an investment tbh and common sense would tell you the likes of Zard and lele will both plummet price wise once people realise the pop rise in the Zard and the price drop in lele once it is rotated out of being playable.
They are beautiful cards to own so once I finish my wotc goals I will finish collecting them all as 10’s.
As for players cards, players often try to resell their cards as rotation approaches and it causes the price of an item to drop quite significantly (Full art Shaymin going from nearly 100 at one point to like 10 currently IE) - even despite the fact that there is now an expanded format allowing older cards to be played competitively. Expanded does not have the popularity of standard. In terms of being sought after for future old vintage decks, I think there are so many of these cards in existence that anything that was playable in its era is not going to see any major price hike for the collector side of the hobby.
Players typically don’t seek after cards for the sake of collecting (Although some of us do dabble 
) and playable cards may not always be someone’s favorite pokemon or anything on that scope