What is a "normal" Pokemon market

Its all very interesting.
When a sealed box goes up enough in price, people wont be opening as many anymore which means the supply of cards is going to stagnate. Also something to think about i guess.

I got a psa 9 japanese charizard last week like @handschoen and i dont understand why anyone pays so much for a pack when you can get the chase cards for current prices.

Just got both Blastoise and the Venusaur japanese basic psa 9 to complete the trio for 295usd, which makes absolutely no sense to me.

For me this is an opportunity buying singles now as the consensus is to buy sealed boxes instead.

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I would compare the link between the box price and the singles prices as a spring that changes tention though external factors. At a certain point they will get closer together again.
Box prices could go down, but as many mentioned here, many are limited the prices seem more firm.

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Buying singles is definitely the bees knees at the moment. Expensive boxes will still be opened by streamers due to the surge in viewers they receive, contributing to an increasing number of cards and a decreasing amount of sealed product.

I think people will pay more than all the chase cards combined in a set for a sealed pack because the pack is viewed as a separate item from the cards with its own rarity, identity and desirability.

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I honesty don’t know if there has ever been a time where singles have been so cheap compared to box prices. I am currently revising ebay listings, and its unreal how much supply there is for set cards.

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I think when theres a 99.9% you loose money opening a expensive vintage pack the interest will quickly fade away.
At some point people will just stop gambling and start buying the cards they want instead of the packs but i totally get that each year theres less packs available but right now there seems to be plenty left for everyone.

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That’s why I’m buying all the ones I need for set completion :eyes:

We say that but box breaks keep selling despite a pack costing 300 plus

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I don’t think people paying huge premiums for sealed product are it doing it to open. I think they value the item sealed and intend to keep it that way. It’s a separate identity and form of collecting from the cards.

A wall/shelf of sealed booster boxes does look absolutely insane ĀÆ_(惄)_/ĀÆ

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An iconic meme I must remember every time I look at my small sealed collection lmao

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I think we are also not taking sentiment into consideration. Did any of us as kids go to Toys R Us to buy singles or to open a box/pack? People are more interested in potential value over expected value at the moment, along with the comfort of paying a premium for something they get to relive if they decide to open sealed product. If you want to buy 3 Dragonites, then you are smart enough to do that rather than buy x amount of sealed to try and pull those. Let’s not forget about all the new money thinking they can buy a box for 2k, pull a zard and express it at 150, and then be disappointed it doesn’t come back a 10 - you see it on reddit all the time.

I think we are just over analyzing normal market flows at this point. Is a ā€œnormalā€ market something that benefits you or benefits the person you’re selling to? Pick which one we should complain about.

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It is worth considering that some people don’t want to buy singles, they want to crack packs. A close friend of mine opens packs randomly every time he is near a booster box (I estimate at least $2k worth of packs per month) at our LGS.

He doesn’t care what set it is, he is not completing a collection goal, actually the cards just get chucked into the void of his storage room.

Also, there are some ā€˜hard-mode’ collectors who actually make it a point of completing sets and mastersets by opening packs. You can’t get those people to buy singles, and very rarely will you be able to trade them as they want that binder to be of cards that they themselves (or their favourite streamer) pulled.

I know these outliers are not the norm, but there are millions of collectors out there, each with their own behavioral patterns and personal motivations for doing what they do, so it is impossible to rationalize or predict it in such a linear manner.

Now regarding the ā€˜what is a normal pokemon market’ question, I feel we have a very normal Pokemon market at the moment. Supply is there, community engagement is there, affordability is there, it’s so normal it’s almost boring.

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I’d agree that what we see now is likely the new normal. Just some vintage singles seem oddly low.

As for your friend I hope he at least completes the sets with that amount of ripping each month. That’s a lot of packs and assuming he pays full retail price, a lot of cards

The market feels pretty ā€˜normal’ to me right now in the sense that there’s been mostly stability in a lot of cards that went crazy in 2020/2021. At the same time, there’s also been a lot of different price movement depending on the particular card/set and of course the actual era it’s from. For the most part the only things that have gone crazy the past while would have been some of the pre-2020 Japanese stuff. 151 also had a bit of a rush at first, but has ultimately winded down for now it seems.

Personally, I like buying vintage in this market the most and then just waiting on modern stuff to drop more in price after a few months.

So I’d pretty much say a ā€˜normal’ market just means any part of the market that isn’t being driven by some type of irrational hype or other crazy factors. If things are mostly quiet and stable for months on end with little change in prices, to me that’s about as normal as it gets.

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