This may be a dumb question but I’m genuinely curious.
Why is wotc so expensive/popular? I understand they had a small run of 4-5 years. But we don’t know print run numbers so how do we know there aren’t warehouses full of old wotc product out there?
Would love to hear opinions and thoughts.
I think print numbers for each WOTC set vary quite a bit, but vintage is vintage and those are the sets many people grew up collecting. It’s been said on this forum many times that at this point, especially with the boom in 2020, that any warehouses with pallets of WOTC boxes would have surfaced by now.
People have speculated on the rough numbers of sealed boxes left from that era but there is no way to know for sure. Could someone have a warehouse with thousands of sealed boxes? Sure. However, I think it is highly, highly, highly unlikely.
Demand for them is always going to be stable until everyone alive in 1998 dies.
They are “the” Pokémon cards. They are the cards to which the most people worldwide formed the most attachment to and they are where an entire generation of collectors can trace their roots. Even if they found an airplane hangar full of mint cards the market for them is probably big enough to swallow it and ask for more.
Part of the appeal is of course that they are the vintage originals from the era where Pokémon was most popular and most mysterious, but also they are just the cards that affected the most amount of people. If you were there for even part of that era of Pokémon, you will probably always go back to them in some way or start there if you begin collecting as an adult.
Have you seen moonbreon? Makes vintage look cheap!
Even late era wotc cards like e-series?
Interesting
Late-era WotC cards have the mystique of being the end of a story you were told as a kid but never heard how it ended.
Is WotC “so expensive?” It seems extraordinarily reasonably priced compared to nearly everything else people in the hobby are buying lol.
Are there many chase cards, outside of 1st edition base, in LP condition that is more expensive than a NM moonbreon? Or even a NM Charizard Alt Art
I will say, I never fully understood how late-WotC (i.e., e-Series) has any more mystique than early-EX (RS-MA). They’re (1) comparably old, (2) comparably scarce, (3) designed by the same team, and (4) equally nostalgic for someone who stopped collecting in 2000-2001.
How meaningful is the fact that the distributorship arrangement changed between May 2003 (Skyridge) and June 2003 (RS)? As someone who collects both eras, I never really understood what makes the distinction meaningful to people (aside from it just being an easy way to set collecting goal boundaries – which is totally fair, but still arbitrary).
What you have to account for is that “Pokémania” ended in the Game Boy Era. There is a huge population of players who have a strong attachment to those two games and that specific time period. They don’t feel that for Generation III, which was the first Generation that played anew after they outgrew Pokémon.
The fact WotC cards also begin and end in the Game Boy era is meaningful. For these players who stopped after G/S/C, Generation III doesn’t hold any nostalgia at all. People who exited after Crystal, or even before Crystal, relate to the later WotC sets as the end of “their era” of Pokémon, even if they weren’t present for it. But Generation III was a new era, one that began with out them.
Early-EX was also part of the Gameboy era. Nintendo’s handheld/console gaming lineup was the same on May 12, 2003 (Skyridge release) as it was on June 18, 2003 (RS release) – so that can’t be the explanation.
The Gen III point is fair, though.
When I say “Game Boy Era” what I’m really referring to are Pokémon RBY and GSC rather than the hardware itself, which I realize is not very clear. Obviously all of the e-Series sets are affiliated directly with the Game Boy Advance, but the Pokémon represented in those series of cards are still tied to Generation II of Pokémon.
This is why even though the cards are literally novelties associated with the Game Boy Advance, I still think of them as part of the Game Boy Era of Pokémon. The “Advance” generation of Pokémon did not formally begin until the release of Ruby & Sapphire. So all those WotC cards are contained with “Generation II”, which was a Game Boy series of titles.
I admit this is a subjective perception of the cards, but people’s relationship to them is also subjective and there is a kind of cutoff that exists with the release of Ruby & Sapphire specifically.
I agree that e series WoTC gets a lot of its allure over early ex due to gen 3 introduction. Even now, I find myself preferring when modern sets have gen 1 and 2 pokemon, as that’s what I know best.
My best simple answer to why WoTC is so expensive: Nostalgia. People like things that remind them of their childhood when things were simpler and didn’t know what the word “mortgage” meant.
I feel there’s a perception that anything WOTC is strictly better. People love to attach labels to stuff and WOTC is easily the most common one thrown around by newer collectors.
Many people in the hobby have rationalized something along the lines of “Expedition - Skyridge are WOTC so they’re in the same league as Base, Neo etc. whereas R&S - TMTA aren’t”. I agree it’s not entirely rational but so much of a card’s perceived value is driven by emotions and hype. Even if EX era E-readers have comparable art quality and are in many cases more scarce than WOTC E-series the widespread perception is they aren’t at the same level.
Which is fine. Just means I’m able to pick up many beautiful PSA 9 EX-era E-series for sub-$50.
Others have mentioned nostalgia, age, and limited supply (e.g., e-Series) which I agree with.
Another point is that most “collectors” in the late 1990s and early 2000s took very poor care of their cards. Remember, the predominant consumers were children and young adolescents at this time. Most of us carried cards in our backpacks and pockets and showed them to friends on the concrete sidewalk at recess. This means that fewer mint copies exist as a proportion of the total supply, which drives a premium to mint vintage WoTC.
Compare this to 2022, where children, adolescents, and adults collect, and (almost) everyone practices proper storage and protection.
I don’t lose sleep at night about additional supply. Even if thousands of boxes of each WoTC set were found, the number of holographic rares, shining cards, and crystal cards from this supply would be easily consumed by today’s demand.
Yeah I’m not seeing it either. If anything, I think a lot of WOTC stuff is underpriced right now relative to a lot of other sections of the market.
I would challenge the idea that wotc cards were “a small run”. We are talking about one of the most successful trading card games of all time.
Maybe compared to today the amount printed might be small but I’d argue thats an inflated number. In terms of cards people actually are buying, you get 1 wotc holo in every 30ish cards and 1 alt art in say 1:2000 cards printed. You need to print about 70x as much for there to be a similar number of hits in circulation.
Anyway that’s a side point. What I want to say is that there was actually A LOT of WOTC cards printed. Even if there was a magical warehouse that is 25+ years old and didn’t open their doors during 2020, it would have to be massive to make a dent in the singles market. Box prices might temporarily dip but that just encourages more to be opened. If would take a vast untapped supply to put a dent in graded card prices
I agree that WOTC as an era wasn’t a small print run. It was most likely the most printed era until the past few years. While the latter part of WOTC sets are obviously scarcer than base unlimited, they are scarcer in the context of being retail product sold on shelves, which is not actually that scarce.
With that said, 2020 was the perfect storm to add the most supply in a short period of time. Of course there will always be more WOTC cards tricklingly into the market, but to replicate the past couple years is extremally improbable.
A proxy measure that can be used is graded pop reports. We will never know the exact print run numbers, but we do know how many graded copies there are of XYZ card. So you can use that as a rough guideline to gauge supply.
So you could extrapolate that out and if you think there is a warehouse with 20,000 base set boxes in it you can do the maths.