I’m not sure if anyone has brought up this scenario on here before, but I was thinking about this topic the other day and was curious as to what others were thinking.
What do you think would have happened to the collectibility of Pokemon if all 150/151 were included in the original base set instead of being spread out over the course of the first three sets?
How do you think this would have impacted the collectibility of the cards back in 1999 and in the present day?
Feel free to go your own route with this scenario as well, these were just some of the questions I was pondering
People didn’t buy sets that followed. They felt satisfied with having collected all of the Pokemon that were near and dear to them. Think about the disappointing sales of the following sets we had anyway and then multiply it by ten. That’s the worst case scenario that I see.
People have a crazy appetite for the first set and they get it with the first set. The company predicts the poor sales after the first wave and has to reinvent the next couple sets. It isn’t going to be enough, they know, to just have the same things again. So they introduce a bunch of interesting variations: Trainers take a more significant presence within the set. We see locations being used as stadiums. The tie-in from the games becomes more thorough.
The most interesting thing is that I still see the franchise itself panning out more or less the same in either way. I think the video games force changes in the trading card game well enough and the R&D team was versed enough to generally direct the TCG according to logic independent of the contents relative to the 151.
I’m excited to read the results of other peoples’ imaginations, though!
The long term consequences of this are also fairly interesting to consider; had all the original Pokemon been squeezed into one set, the distribution of card values would probably be very different from what they are now. The “Big 3” starters of Base Set may not be worth nearly as much had they had to compete with things like the Eeveelution trio or the Legendary birds. Either that, or the “Big 3” remain the same, while the Jungle and Fossil chase cards become much less relevant without their own spotlights.
The idea of 1st Edition, Shadowless, Unlimited, and 4th print runs of three sets worth of cards is also pretty entertaining.
or the oppsite the big three become evan more value as with 151 cards plus trainers be more holos so say you get 11 out of the 16 holos then there would be say double that so 11 out of 32 holos be evan rarer so maybe every third box you get a zard
