Astronomical prices.
I feel like I should just wait until popularity drops and then complete my collection at a fraction of the cost.
Scalping.
It’s discouraging to struggle to get items that should be plentiful through official sources at MSRP prices and it feels bad to buy scalped things and encourage it further.
Scamming.
With the high amount of money in the hobby causes a lot more fake cards, fake slabs, WhatNot scamming, stealing, ebay scams. It’s tiring to constantly be on edge and vigilant about crime related to a card game.
Blandness.
There may be a lot more content online about the hobby, but the vast majority of it is extremely bland and uninteresting. Pack opening videos, collection pictures of just random modern SIRs, everyone talking about the same thing, very few visible people doing interesting niche content/research
What are the positive aspects to take away from all the negativity that comes with popularity?
If you’re a sociable person then the market booming means there’s more people than ever interested in Pokemon. So maybe one benefit is you could make friends?
Booms bring out a lot of cards for sale, and bring more people into the hobby. Not all will stay, but people who are genuinely interested are more likely to!
I also think there are benefits to engaging during peaks and valleys. Each help you appreciate things about the other.
The attention can bring old friends back too, which is fun. The friendships to be made collecting might be the most valuable thing any of us get out of all this cardboard in the end.
There’s always cheap cards. It used to be more widespread (every era) though now it’s probably only the most recent modern cards minus the chase cards. Still, there is so much great art for cheap of so many Pokemon, how can one not appreciate that?
From my experience the recent boom made card shows/events explode in popularity in my country, and we now have tons available all year round which wasn’t really the case just a couple years ago.
I feel like this is indeed true to some extend. You may be priced out of those rare cards way earlier in addition to it, but I do feel like especially during the Covid period, A LOT of rare cards have emerged, some of which were never even seen before. And it also happened a lot more frequently than in the first ~5 years I’ve collected.
In general though, I feel like @wisewailmer hits the hammer on the head. If you already own a lot of cards, which you’ve bought for less than 1/10th of the current market prices, selling during peak popularity is a huge benefit (if you’re not lazy like me ).
Some other small benefits I can think of:
Although it’s kinda arbitrary due to scalpers and such, a lot more cards are being printed. In the last few years literal billions of cards have been printed. And although imo it’s still not enough for the more popular sets to keep up with demand and counteract scalpers, it’s still a fact cards are being printed a lot more, even more so than during the initial release in 1999.
TPCi somewhat learns from their mistakes and the scalper market, which is in return somewhat beneficial to collectors. Examples of this:
A hundred cards each were given to the winners of the Art Academy illustration contest in 2015. Yet for the 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2024 illustration contests, the winning cards were mass-produced as promos for all collectors to enjoy.
The Van Gogh Pikachu was a huge scalper-fest, with people entering and exiting the Museum multiple times; buying cards from visitors exiting the Museum; and they were already out of stock in the first 1-2 weeks, even though the event ran for a couple months. With the upcoming Pikachu for the National Historical Museum in London I think it will be somewhat similar, but they did made it a Jumbo, possibly to reduce demand somewhat, since the average collector prefers regular sized cards over Jumbo cards (although I’m not sure if it’s done on purpose for this reason or not tbh).
Due to the popularity of Pokémon, multiple new TCG languages have been added in recent years: Thai in February 2019; Indonesian in May 2019; S. Chinese in October 2022; Latin American Spanish in March 2025, which for collectors from those perspective countries is a huge benefit I’d imagine. For all-language species collectors it might be less beneficial, especially in the long run.
Although a lot more scalpers and investors have been added to the market, the same can be said for collectors. And I feel that’s a good and fun thing, among other things here on the forum.
Although I still feel there are more disadvantages than advantages for such a boom in popularity, for me personally mostly in terms of expenses, there are loads of small benefits to it as well indeed.
Things can feel more exciting at the beginning of a boom, with a lot of people jumping in or coming back. There’s more liquidity, so if you want to trade or sell some pieces to afford a collection goal it’s much easier to facilitate. People are more likely to care about your collection, if you’re inclined to share what you have. More packs get printed (eventually) and people are nice enough to store them away carefully so we can enjoy them in the future. Also rare things can come out of the woodwork with all the extra attention that gets spread around, instead of languishing in attics.
Obviously there’s also a bunch of negatives as well but there’ll be plenty of time to enjoy a quieter paced environment in the future I think.
A small benefit that comes to mind is that your relatives or boomer parents become slightly more interested in your hobby or collection . From their perspective, I was probably a weirdo until they started reading about celebrities collecting Pokémon, a famous tennis player showing a card during a match, and so on.
I made a genuine IRL friend. If I met him pre-2020 I would never have brought up to him that I do this. That’s a bigger win than all of the financial gains I have gotten over the last year.
This is the answer. Everyone being negative wasn’t here during the dark ages. Either people are unaware or don’t want to acknowledge that the marketing which resulted from growth is why they stumbled upon pokemon.
Also speaking of the dark ages, Will is spot on about rare cards. The same illustrator and few other trophies were the only copies you saw for a decade. What’s appeared in the last couple years is more than the previous 25 combined!
To the part about illustrators and trophies, do you think it is more related to the boom than technology and the global economy advancing enough that it is much easier for Japan to have access to Western markets? Even 10 years ago it was much more difficult to import cards
It’s the result of growth. If anything imports have become more constiapted lately, but its more about awareness from growth. Akabane and co apparently had those cards since the 90s. But selling illustrators for 20k is less appealing than 500k. Plus the lack of liquidity would have been another barrier. It’s hard to make an article broadcasting a record sale when cards sat at the same prices for years. Growth changed all of that, it’s the biggest factor!
I never stopped collecting pokemon. I always bought packs at stores, but i had no knowledge about sets, what was good pulls, rarity or anything.
I never thought of going online to look, because pokemon was uncool and in my area there were no stores, no one to share info with me about anything. And when you live in a bubble like that you kind of think its like that everywhere? So why would anyone be online about it? Never even crossed my mind.
So i bought what i bought never had (in hindsight) good luck with pulls, but I didn’t know that cause as they say ignorance is bliss.
All of my reference for if i pulled something good came from the games and if i pulled a pokemon that was my favorites from the games, which i played by borrowing cousins gameboys and then replayed in full when I finally got a original nintendo ds.
I completely fell out of collecting from 2015-2019 because life went to hell in a handbasket with health crisis with immediate family and multiple deaths of immediate family.
I did not reenter the hobby until 2022 and it was not due to anything with fomo or whatever crap was going on online. It’s because i happened to walk by the pokemon rack at Rite Aid and remembered that this was something i loved, life was starting to get back on track and i could think about doing stuff i loved again. So from 2022 i continued much as i had before, except now i looked up stuff online in regards to sets and what cards were actually out there for pokemon i liked.
A few card shops had opened in my area so i started frequenting them, picked up stuff i liked started contemplating Mastersets and working on completing older sets. It was fun i started talking to people and was able to pick up cards at leisure and my card budget felt adequate, depending on what was going on that month 0-150 was my budget.
if I missed a card or had another unexpected expense no biggie the cards weren’t going anywhere.
Then 2024 and everything changed. Prices went through the roof, no product, no sense of ease or fun when collecting cause if you see a card thats still affordable you have no certianity it will remain that way or if some influencer will decide its the next card they want to artificially inflate the price of. There are card shows in my area now, and more singles but i can afford hardly any of it now.
But i was never online for any of the covid boom, i knew nothing about evo skies or the moonbreon or the fact that pokemon as suddenly A Thing. Thats why this current 2024 onwards boom angers me so much because a hobby that has been a part of my life since release and for the most part been affordable and attainable is now not.
So i have a skewed perspective of the boom and the dark ages? If 2022-2023 was considered a boom, great lets get back to that boom. Whatever is going on from 2024 to now… I can hardly stand it.
Due to how i went about collecting, which i guess some might say wasn’t really collecting at all since i really knew nothing about what i was doing when i bought stuff.
One thing I will say is that during the boom of 2020, I was looking for cheaper options and so I moved into collecting Diamond and Pearl. I now collect DP to this day and thoroughly enjoy the set cards and JP promos.
So an advantage is it can incentivize you to discover less explored, but still fun and historic, parts of the TCG.
).
. From their perspective, I was probably a weirdo until they started reading about celebrities collecting Pokémon, a famous tennis player showing a card during a match, and so on.