I haven’t been on here in a few weeks — taking a holiday hiatus from Pokémon shit in general, to the extent possible — but I figured I’d drop in and share my thoughts on the current low-to-mid value market… not like anyone asked, but.
I currently have 55 fucking eBay items to ship out, and have been selling an average of 20+ per week the entire month of December. I am not a big seller… This is all extra junk out of my personal collection that I’ve been slowly unloading over the last year. I realize that my experience is 100% anecdotal and not necessarily indicative of overall market trends, but I am seeing no signs whatsoever of a retrace in the items I deal in (I primarily sell English set cards and promos from WOTC through BW in the $5-$100 range).
Obviously, high-end graded cards (Base Set/WOTC in particular) have taken a bit of a hit, but cheap stuff is still flying off the digital shelves at a rate I have never seen in my 15+ years in the hobby — and at significantly higher prices than they went for a year ago. I hypothesized a few months ago that while many of the people who entered the hobby during the Base Set feeding frenzy would lose interest, others would get sucked in and expand their purchasing past the initial WOTC sets, which would eventually drive up prices and demand for those down the line. I have no concrete proof that said trend is happening, but I’d like to think it is!
Right around early-mid December, my eBay sales were slowing down a bit and I did a little experiment: a 15% reduction in price across the 800+ Pokemon listings I have on eBay. And holy fuck did I not expect how much sales would increase. I expected maybe a 10% or 20% increase in sales, but it’s been more like a 150% increase in sales. It was so extreme that I ended up increasing the prices across the board by 10% because I had real life stuff that I needed to attend to lol.
So what I’ll say is that the market is insanely active right now. But there definitely have been price decreases for pretty much everything WotC except for Neo. I know this firsthand from eBay but also from T&T buylist prices. Luckily I sold most of my early WotC holos at the peak, but I did have to reduce prices on several cards pretty substantially in order to get them to sell. And even then some still haven’t sold.
I’ve also noticed a pretty significant retrace on many ex PSA 10s. I was able to purchase several for like half what they would’ve sold for just a few months ago – and none of them have increased in pop during that time. But then again, some of the higher pop ones have increased in price during that same time. Confusing, and makes zero sense to me. So the market is very active, but also very unstable and speculative.
Oddly specific question/topic here that I was just discussing with my roommate: why is Time Space Distortion so god damn cheap? I get that it’s a one-off secret rare, so it doesn’t have an overarching legacy linked to it a la gold stars, exs, even Lv.Xs, etc… But it’s such a beautiful card with an extremely low pull rate. Seems like it was almost more desirable when it came out!
@tim.Wins It will help me buy one card… That’s not exactly going to put a whole collection together for me. People blaming the stimulus checks are pretty dumb in my opinion.
I don’t think $600 is going to make a difference. I think it would take a more for this to effect the prices on pokemon cards.
An extra $600 for most isn’t going to do much. It’s not like I can finally now go buy a PSA 8 1st Ed. Charizard because I received a couple hundred bucks.
Even for cards in the $10-$50 range, I don’t think there will be an increase in demand when those cards most likely have a higher total volume available.
You just have to think about what 600$ can buy you - a low demand 1st ed psa 10/2 PSA 9s, 1-2 boosters of some sort, a few lesser desirable raw cards etc etc.
A 600$ stimulus won´t affect people spending 10k on something, it´s a drop in the bucket. These kind of people won´t need 600$ for getting incentiviced to buy pokemon cards.
Stimulus is better than no stimulus so it should be a net positive. Consistent with the size of the check, it’s probably more impactful in the lowest end stuff and zero impact at the upper end.
Sure we can analyse who gets the checks what they do with it etc, overall the net effect of an increased money supply in my opinion is an increase in the price of all assets - asset price inflation, whether that’s collectibles, real estate, stocks, modern or vintage Pokemon cards, cryptocurrency, commodities/precious metals.
More money is in circulation, the 600 usd find It’s way into a richer persons hands who will be wanting to buy the more expensive card.
I think there was “some” effect from the previous stimulus payments. Whether or not the effect was noteworthy is a different story. All it takes is one person who used that money to buy some cards for it to have had some temporary effect on the market, however small or immeasurable that effect may be. That’s literally the only requirement.
As others mentioned, $600 isn’t going to change anything in the middle or high end market. However, I do believe it will directly impact one segment: modern sealed product. I’m talking about things like Vivid Voltage booster boxes. I have no doubt that some people are going to spend some of their stimulus money to pick up a box of that. I mean, I’m thinking about doing the same thing, just for fun. That will surely make auctions end a little higher than they would have.
With the timing of Shining Fates, the stimulus money might also cause pre-orders to go just a little bit higher in dollar amount than they otherwise would have. Of course the set was already going to be very popular and sell for above MSRP. I’m just saying the stimulus money could make those prices go ever so slightly higher in the short term.
And then the money they spent goes into the hands of a retailer who makes more profit who may decide to buy a more expensive card.
More money in the economy means prices of assets will go up as the value of that money is now less
Sure the direct impact stimulus money may be spent on some
Modern product but more money circulating means indirect impacts on all assets in my opinion
Any impact on the prices of cards will be very, very minor. This is an international market, and $600 per person isn’t that much. It would be one thing if all of that money was going into one segment of the market – that could have a meaningful effect. But the market has so much variety that no one segment is going to benefit from it that much.
I think this is spot-on. I’m primarily a low-end seller, and I saw a noticeable boost in sales immediately following the first round of payments. I think that was compounded by quarantine boredom, but that’s probably less of a factor now.
We might not see an uptick in sales/prices, but I bet this round of stimulus checks prolongs the spike we’re still in the middle of. Extra money in peoples’ pockets is always a good thing for sellers.
Also, I’d like to think there isn’t much overlap between the people eligible for the stimulus and the people dropping $10k all at once on Pokemon cards…
