well i kinda meant the more vintage ones, all of them are negative ev but its prolly not so bad if its like a $5 pack 
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You’re trying to apply rational thinking to an irrational decision - gambling is not rational. If everyone thought about gambling rationally and performed an EV calculation before playing, every casino would go out of business.
The target audience for pack ripping are folks who don’t care about pack EV. The target audience buys into the hype, wants the acknowledgement of having their name called out when “their” pack gets opened on stream, and wants the endorphine rush you get from betting big on a pack to maybe hit a jackpot card. It’s their entertainment, and a subset also does it because they have a gambling problem.
They will buy packs again and again because those things are more important than making a positive EV decision. If your average collector cared about EV then no one would open packs at all - it’s almost always a -EV decision when the packs are purchased for retail price.
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Evolving Skies is the greatest product conceived by man and will eclipse all others in value, it’s only a matter of time. You’ll be using 1st ed Base boxes to jack up your lambo after selling a single ES pack.
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Ok, Pokebuffet
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some of the odds on these packs are so low it makes EV for casinos look like a steal 
afaik all the odds for every variant of casino games have been calculated and posted online and the casino never has more than like an 8% advantage or so. buying vintage sports and pokemon packs at box breaker prices youve gotta be at least a 50% underdog prolly way worse tho
Precovid was a different atmosphere for sure. And people who think like that about evolving skies are new around here. When I got back into collecting in 2015 the market was still. Nothing really going on. The first mini jump and hype came in 2018 and another huge jump came in 2019, way before covid. A lot of people forget that and say 2020 is when the jump came and changed the game. When we say “jump” Im talking about prices, I didnt mention pricing at all when discussing why ES will be a top 10 set in the future. Someone else did though.
I will say that through everything ive seen in this hobby, I havent seen such hype and commotion surrounding a set besides Base Set and Evolving Skies. Thats why I talk about it eventually being in the top 10. The atmosphere it brought with it was pretty crazy. Rightfully so with all the alt arts being top tier bangers.
2016: “Am I invisible to you?!” 
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2016 was pogo but purchasing/investing wise I dont remember a massive change in the market. I was collecting pretty normally in 2016. Unless Im forgetting something. The days where if I wanted a card it was there and for a great price. In 2019 that all changed 
I might be drawing a blank but I dont remember that tag team had an abundance of alt arts. I know they have bangers though. I remember the latios, gengar, magikarp, pikachu and venusaur alts, are there more on that tier? Those alts are insane. I have to look up the rest. ES has 12 solid memorable alts that are top tier so its hard to imagine team up goes toe for toe but let me revisit that set. As for full arts ES also has awesome full arts. Also, just to revise what I said a couple weeks ago, I take back what I said about neo rev solos the list, correction, shining gary solos the list alone lol
2016 was pokemon go release and 20th woulda been a bump for sure
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I think there are a lot of full arts, but very few alt arts. Shining gary is easily top 10 mainline cards of all time in terms of artwork and Holo Swirl potential
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Yea pogo was 2016 and I remember people going crazy om the streets but I was purchasing my cards pretty normally and without hassle in 2016. No one was trying to upcharge me, no crazy price jumps. 2017 I was buying a lot of evolutions xy packs from my local stores with no restrictions. I remember 2018 things started to shift a little. Then 2019 slapped me across the face pretty hard. The hobby was never the same after that. Then lets no even talk about 2020 lol
300 prototype ‘playtest’ cards that cost 2k+ each will not effect the people buying my 10$ played cards on my eBay store.
Although I would like to think it is
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2019 was interesting, because there was a lot of what I would consider “organic growth” (though that might mean different things to different people). Even later in 2019, around Oct/Nov time, I purchased several cards around the £150 mark such as PSA 10 Dragonite Ex from 2003 Ex Dragon, and 1st edition PSA 9 Lugia from Neo Gen. SM era was just coming to an end, but many XY & SM era products were readily available from online retail. Even despite the hype for Hidden Fates leading into Autumn 2019, it was still widely available on retail shelves, or at least in the UK anyway. It wasn’t until 2020 began that things became unprecedented. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but if memory serves, March 2020 onwards was the tipping point when things started to go crazy. Shelves being emptied, online retail going out of stock instantly, out-of-print SM products (and older) skyrocketing in price, new product pre-orders instantly out of stock, cards that had no inherent rarity skyrocketing in price… I often wonder what the TCG’s trajectory would have looked like without Covid and massive social-influence, because like you say there was definitely a lot of growth around 2018-2019, just nothing like the scale we saw 2020-onwards.
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Yea I agree. It was a smaller portion of specific cards jumping in 2019. My cousins vaporeon 1st ed psa 10 holo went from $450 to 3k in about 4 months back in 2019. And so did some other cards. When 2020 hit… everything and anything was jumping significantly, didnt matter what it was. Stores began putting restrictions on how much product one can purchase and the game changed in general. 2019 was definitely more organic. 2020 was just… psychotic lol. I am also curious to know what would have been if covid never hit. Thats an interesting topic to start an entirely new thread on.
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The cards that went way up then retraced slightly above pre-pandemic levels are right where they would be either way, slow organic growth vs an upside down U curve.
Japanese promo growth with the pandemic has outpaced what would have been organic growth
I don’t think I agree we’d be anywhere near where we are today if not for the pandemic. Those two years (20/21) pulled forward a decade of organic growth if not more, imo
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That I am not SMPratte 
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