I actually intend to make, at some point, another thread based on set design. English sets lack any identity whatsoever and being so humongous nowadays has the added effect of severely reducing set collectors.
Yeah, there will always be variance in popularity of Pokemon, but back when you had Gold Stars etc. people presumably wanted to or didn’t mind pulling any of those in that rarity bracket. These days, there are too many cards, many of which have a lack of demand, stuffed into the same bracket making everything harder to pull. What you described, 2-3 per box, is the rate of Radiants these days and they are worth nothing. Imagine Gold Stars being worth nothing, but in the end, this is just shiny cardboard. TPCi don’t make it worth anymore than it costs.
At bare minimum, there should be 1x of each rarity in a box - creating a limit on how rare something can be - because of how huge sets are. They can also, not that this will raise prices/demand much, reduce the number of cards in a pack because all that bulk is useless. I personally like C/U/R cards for their art but it seems like 90% of the current hobbyists treat it like trash. Why use so much paper to usher things to the landfill?
That number - 9.6b or whatever - of cards printed hides the fact that 90% or more of that is bulk. & putting in more effort into the artwork for all the full art+ cards will increase demand to make up for pulls being more common. Already making them alt arts has a massive multiplier on price.
Of course, I don’t think anything will happen because nothing has yet. We can only hope rainbows disappear or something changes next year.
An interesting thing to breakdown (if no one has done it and wants to spend the time doing it!) would be to look at how many unique cards are released each year in Japanese and English separately. I wonder if there are any trends that can be visualized when comparing the two.
Hello, not sure exactly what you’re trying to argue against me with this reply🤔
I didn’t say there were 2-3 gold stars per box, I said there were 2-3 gold stars per set. For example, ex deoxys : ray, Latias, latios were all in the secret rare slot.
And i talked about most of what you just argued against when I said this :
I do agree bulk is very superfluous and should be chopped down. If they cut it down per pack, but put more packs into each booster box, maybe that would create a better environment for the current pull rates.
On the flip side, that may cut into the ability for kids to join the tourney’s easily, but honestly that’s doubtful. There’s always some dude at the locals looking to dump their bulk and shops have endless amounts.
See if they made alt arts. Rainbows, gold cards and the other secret rare/low pull rate cards easier to pull then we would truly realize how much is actually being printed leaving the value non existent. As far as the modern holos quality is really bad. I don’t know what they were thinking going from Wotc/ex era/diamond and pearl etc to black and white era holos which started the trash design. But it gets worse thru X Y thru Sword and Shield. I think the regular holos are supposed to be worthless and undesirable to make you chase those low pull alt arts. I wonder how many booster boxes people are opening to get one Umbreon Alt Art. How much did that cost compared to the single? Is it worth it? Not in my opinion. Then when I compare pricing why in the world are modern PSA 10s more expensive then pop 100 or less Ex era/Wotc holos? The pop report shows 1k plus graded with in a year. Then it will also show about 75 percent plus 10s for most modern cards … Why the premium?!?
How much as an overall population would you consider too much? If you were to guess, because we can estimate pop now - granted it would be in existence and not opened.
Are there any examples? I thought all the WOTC holos are in the tens of thousands - I don’t follow graded prices so I don’t know. I’m assuming the Umbreon is the most expensive modern PSA 10 and according to poke data.io price is about $700 right now.
Go to Pokemon price or PSA to check pop reports. The only sets with those kinds of numbers for Wotc are the early sets. Definitely worth doing the research yourself. As far as how much is too much? Who knows. I stopped collecting modern awhile ago. Don’t get me wrong I do like some of the cards but not nearly as much as the older stuff. Plus my wallet hates me as is. I can’t afford to collect Wotc and Modern. If anything I’d dive more into Ex era again but there’s still other cards I’m after first
Here are some examples of modern cards selling for over a grand. Below is examples of what you could have got with that money instead. With a few examples of Pop report on truly rare cards
I just went to the lowest print Wotc sets. If you’re comparing to trophies or something else that’s different but I was talking about modern set cards vs Wotc ones and their price points. I haven’t looked too much into ex era but I’m sure those numbers are low too as well as other cards/sets I’m not listing.
Anyways back on track the current modern cards are pretty cool but there’s so much else out there. To each their own. Everyone has their specific taste
Are they rare or not rare? I was under the assumption that everything holo rare+ from anything before BW was rare because of age and because holos were still considered hits then.
Well, maybe Base, Jungle and Fossil aren’t really rare compared to the rest.
