They are today's beanie babies and is a complete waste of money. Even stablecoins have a better use case than this over inflated garbage.
Much like other collectibles all the most valuable cards are so long out of print that even if they were reprinted exactly as they were they would not receive the same valuation by the collectors because they are not the originals.
But the boom in old pokemon cards still drove demand for modern pokemon cards so much so that more pokemon cards have been printed post 2020 than the two decades before it despite the fact that “rare” cards you can obtain in new sets only go for hundreds to thousands at most and yet people still gamble on new pokemon card packs.
Today I went to a hardware store, and was humourously-surprised to find a Pokemon card vending machine there too.
I never see kids using the machine at my local grocery store. I see adults, the same ones that patronize the CA lottery machine located next to the Pokemon machine, loitering while waiting for the next set of packs to "unlock" (they are on a timed release to manage the stock).
It's a depressing sight.
one time we did walk up to it as a few unscrupulous looking guys were hanging out and we figured they're just waiting for a restock. I don't think those vending machines really do anything to prevent people from getting as much as they want.
Pokemon battles have some amount of entertainment value.
I mean sure, it's glorified cock fighting for kids, but that doesn't diminish the utility of the game as entertainment. It just makes it squishier.
I never "got" Pokemon.
The trainer is all lovey-dovey over their pets... NOW fight! One. At. A. Time.
I kept wanting police to roll in with oversized nets and tranquilizer guns to break it all up.
The value is purely artistic. Which is its own value, to be fair. But people aren't buying these expensive cards to use them in the game. They just want them for the art (or simply the rarity)
I think its pretty much just entirely based on a current hype cycle, not even really art per se, I mean the cards aren't hand drawn or anything, they are mass produced cardboard.
Eventually the market will implode like the sneaker resale market did and people will move on to the next thing that gets hyped.
Pokemon cards, on the other hand, are veritable collectors items, like stamps or baseball cards.
Like baseball cards, their value comes from a combination of rarity and nostalgia.
As for utility: it's still entertainment. remember that this is a TCG, so there technically is still a formatted game to play with these cards. Even if most effects in older cards have been long irrelevant in competitive formats, other TCG's can have card prices surge due to new strategies being discovered.
Printing supply is not infinite, theoretical or otherwise. They are printing as much as they can, and currently have a new factory scheduled for construction. Once the factory is online, the supply & demand curve will almost certainly be affected. If it gets to a point where product is abundantly available at MSRP then suddenly the scalpers move to a different market to scalp and long lines of people camping in front of Target overnight dissipate. It will be interesting to see how the market dynamics change once the factory is complete.
Those are definitely factors, but even the most influential celebrity can't sell a turd (see: the insane advertising push for NFT's). There has to be some value in the cards themselves for an influencer to multiply it, then that lack of supply from time makes it easy for scalpers to scalp.
>they have no problem printing cards that look identical to the originals other than a small logo, which many people get and feel no need to acquire the original Charizard.
Yup. I personally am fine satisfying my nostalgia with some later print edition that is $10 instead of $1000 for some "early print" version. I don't fully understand this value of "I must have the original print!", but that admittedly existed long long before we had social media campaigns to influence such desire.
They all went into the loft at some point and later ended up in a bonfire along with my first edition Harry Potter book collection when my mum was doing a "clear out". Such is life.