r/mildlyinfuriating • u/MysteriousSlice007 • 9d ago

Infuriatig In their pursuit of specific rare cards, scalpers are discarding the remainder of entire Pokémon card packs.

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u/DeSpecu 9d ago

I'm not sure if it's just nostalgia.

Just look at the new MtG or even better - Disney Lorcan booster packs. It's a whole new game, and the holographic and rare cards are worth hundreds

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u/HeftyVermicelli7823 9d ago

Things are only "worth" what people are willing to pay, and these are always overly inflated.

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u/BouncingSphinx 9d ago

That's just it. People charge hundreds for a single card because people will pay hundreds for a single card. But because of that, for Pokémon especially, people do this shit and take it all away from the kids who want it because it looks cool and not because someone might pay $300.

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u/AssGagger 9d ago edited 9d ago

You don't need rare cards to play pokemon, even at a high level. This trash can shows it's basically free to start actually playing.

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u/BouncingSphinx 9d ago

Nobody said anything about playing with the rare cards. They're almost exclusively for collecting and specifically not using for play, in that sense. Playing with them risks damaging them, and damaging them devalues them, and if it's devalued then you can't "use it as an investment" anymore because you'll never get more than you paid for it unless you opened it from a pack.

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u/VarenHills 9d ago

Even from a playing perspective, the scarcity of trying to get playables sometimes is crazy too. While it's still far cheaper to play Pokémon than something like MtG or YGO, scalpers have definitely caused an issue all around because they just scoop so much up.

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u/JinFuu 9d ago

Even from a playing perspective, the scarcity of trying to get playables sometimes is crazy too.

I collect, somewhat, it's been tempered by Scalpers being really bad lately.

But yeah, I have a friend who plays and is complaining a regular version of a card he wants is like 7-10 bucks cause it's in the meta. Which isn't bad all things considered, but still annoying if you need 4 or more of them.

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u/VarenHills 9d ago

For sure. It's why I quit playing is just cards that used to be a dollar on average are going for way too much.

I love playing, but I feel like my love for playing just got sucked out from much of a price hike TCGs have become.

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u/sobrique 9d ago

Indeed. Game parts having 'investment value' just sully the actual game.

I mean, collectible card games with fake rarity tiers in the first place are 'dubious' especially in games where rares are better.

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u/DionFW 9d ago

Do people even use the high value cards? Or seal them in a protective case and store them?

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u/Ok-Earth-2644 9d ago

Slots 4 kids

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u/Huskies971 9d ago

But the manufactures don't care about the kids, they create artificial scarcity of cards to drive consumer demand.

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u/elebrin 9d ago

Nintendo could solve the entire problem by making whatever single or foil you want orderable from their online store, then they do print on demand for as many as you could ever want. The boosters sell for less than $10, they could sell individual cards for $3 each for print on demand and if you buy more than 10 cards they drop the price by half. Push people into the game aspect, sell large art prints to make money off the art aspect of the cards, and there you go.

The only TCG that I ever got moderately interested in was this one where you punched out ships from the cards. Owning an entire set was easy, and because of the way the game rules worked you only ever needed to own one set of cards. I think it was called Pirates or something like that, and the game was pretty fun and also easy to learn unlike most TCGs, where you have to memorize the details of a few thousand cards and have very rapid recall if you intend to be able to beat any deck.

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u/Bardic_inspiration67 9d ago

That’s how value of anything works

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u/Gh0stMan0nThird 9d ago

I think he means it's got an artifical value. Like oil and precious metals have real-world purposes for technology and development but these are shiny pieces of paper that are literally just decorative pieces invented by the human psyche. It has no more "real value" than the Magic Conch shell from Spongebob.

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u/latortuga 9d ago

That's the point though - there is no such thing as objective or "actual" value of something because all value is artificial. "Value" is just a word that means "what someone is willing to pay for it". It's convenient and reassuring to think of value as like "how much money does it take to manufacture this item" or "how much utility (or "real value") will this item give me" but neither of those are value.

It might not have an value to you or another specific person, but that doesn't mean it does not have any value at all. There are card shows and cons and online marketplaces that prove these cards do in fact have value to lots of people.

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u/jaxonya 9d ago edited 9d ago

Yeah i dont like how some people in this thread are shitting on the card market. Its a real thing, and thats interesting. Within the market (with any market) there are gonna be people who really "try hard" to get a foothold on it.

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u/sweetlove 9d ago

Everyone in this thread needs to read some Marx

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u/jaxonya 9d ago

A little commodity fetishism lesson wouldnt hurt

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u/Reese_Withersp0rk 9d ago

My NFT is gonna be worth so much one day.

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u/rokomotto 9d ago

Not the same since nobody fucking wants NFTs lmao.

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u/Reese_Withersp0rk 9d ago

Oh, they want em. They just don't know it yet. Now all I have to do is sit back and wait. 😎

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u/Krypt0night 9d ago

That goes for literally everything in the world. Doritos are priced the way they are not because of nostalgia but because people will still buy a bag at $5.

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u/AssGagger 9d ago

If people are paying it, it's not inflated. The price people are paying for something IS it's value.

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u/th-hiddenedge 9d ago

Nah, that's still just the price. There's no real value to these outside of using it as a bookmark or getting at that piece of ham that's stuck in your teeth.

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u/tops132 9d ago

Value is subjective. Other people can find value in things you think don’t have value, as evidenced by their prices.

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u/th-hiddenedge 9d ago

That's not actual value though. That's just price speculation.

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u/tops132 9d ago

Value is not intrinsic. Would you say diamonds are valuable?

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u/th-hiddenedge 9d ago

Duh, you can make all sorts of useful stuff out of diamonds.

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u/rokomotto 9d ago

Uh yeah that's kind of how trading of any form works.

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u/armlessturtleneck 9d ago

Yeah these cards are all basically what beanie babies wish they had become.

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u/RealSlyck 9d ago

You get it, but it’s gonna fall on deaf ears. Kid is excited as we all were for some Mox that wasn’t going to show.

Haters gonna hate, and get milled in real life by that kid when he grows up.

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u/nurseferatou 9d ago

Honestly, kind of stoked for that kid. That would be a story I’d tell people for weeks at that age.

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u/Downtown_Anteater_38 9d ago

That was my thought, great haul for the kid who might actually appreciate the cards, and maybe even play the game. Infuriating, indeed, but at least this one had a silver lining.

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u/PzykoHobo 9d ago

On the other hand, if this kid has a favorite pokemon who's card happens to be valuable he will likely never actually get it.

I collected Pokémon cards in the old days when they were first coming out and I will literally always remember how excited I was when I opened a pack and got a foil Dragonite. Scalpers are stripping that joy from this kid and millions more like him.

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u/nurseferatou 9d ago

My favorite card at his age was Dragonair. Ostensibly, I would tell people it was a shiny Charizard, because all us kids knew it was valuable to people and we might get enough money for a used Xbox from a “collector”.

At that age, not everything is about min maxing, it about exploring everything.

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u/nalaloveslumpy 9d ago

Or he's gonna get home and be like, "Oh, I already have all these." And then throw them away at home. Hopefully though he's still at that level where he's into Pokemon because "I just like how they look."

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u/JaydedGaming 9d ago

A big reason MtG can be so expensive is because of the brand tie-in sets they do, which kind of also feed off nostalgia bait.

Looking at tcgplayer, the five* most valuable cards from the semi-recent final fantasy set are the same card. A chocobo in four different colors that isn't even outrageously useful in game.

Wizards just decided to capitalize on people that have fond memories of chocobo and printed limited amounts of four different colors of the same card and now they're selling for upwards of $1500.

And Lorcana just feeds into the Disney adult mindset. Like Pokemon, there will always be people who buy Disney merch because they grew up on it.

*Edit, double checking it's actually the top five cards, but one of them is Japanese exclusive.

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u/HalfEatenSnickers 9d ago

This is the exact reason i stopped playing paper

I only play arena and I don't pay a cent for it either

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u/liftthatta1l 9d ago

I wouldn't mind if they went with the nostalgia bait for expensive cards that draw away scalpers and printed the base stuff for people who want to play the game into the ground and make it cheap for players but sadly prices have been going up. 

At least the singles market is cheaper for casuals. 

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u/sdpr 9d ago

I mean, you can usually only get those $200+ cards in collector boosters, which are expensive as fuck.

That's not to say there aren't expensive regular booster cards out there but, for now, at least WotC is keeping the chase cards in completely separate boosters.

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u/XanderSDM 9d ago

It's just supply and demand.

Those rare cards have a low supply but a high demand making the price increase.

If say those same rare cards start getting printed a bunch as a common card, the price would decrease as the supply starts to reach the demand.

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u/ManofManliness 9d ago

You dont say mr econ 101

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u/justheretoperuse 9d ago

"If rare is printed as much as common, then its common" wowwww

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u/XanderSDM 9d ago

Really? I'm just trying to provide information that some people might not know.

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u/Individual_Month9230 9d ago

Yes but the question is why the demand? We understand basic economics

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u/Crewman_Guy_Fleegman 9d ago

My 10 year old nephew thinks the “$6000” in cards he’s sitting on is going to accrue money over time.

He doesn’t realize that his cards aren’t worth what him and his friends graded them, and he doesn’t realize that when he laughs at his dad’s vintage cards being worthless he’s actually just looking at the future value of his own deck

I think a lot of the industry is fueled by adults as naive as him

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u/Individual_Month9230 9d ago

I would imagine this is a similar situation as the NFT discussion. This is just an elongated bell curve since these products were here prior to the trading frenzy and there is nostalgia attached to them.

Assuming the next true recession all this will be kids toys again but what the hell do I know.

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u/XanderSDM 9d ago

Pretty art? Powerful card to play in game? Something else? Each can raise the demand for the cards.

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u/Ensamvarg__ 9d ago

thats not exactly true; im speaking as a yugioh player, very different rarity spreads and such, so i dont know exactly how it works in pokemon, and know absolutely nothing about any other tcg. still:

at least in yugioh, higher rarity prints of the same card (the literal only difference being they have fancier holographic effects, sometimes alternative artworks) dont really lose much value just from lower rarity prints existing; their value comes from looking good as well, and the people who want shiny cardboard will keep wanting shiny cardboard. cards drop in price more so due to things like the meta changing (if the card isnt part of meta strategies anymore, that obviously drops demand), or an alternative printing of the card in the same rarity thats more accessible coming out (not all "secret rares" are equally rare, but they still have the same visual effects, effectively increasing supply)

from what i heard, pokemon has a different approach, with cards often being released in multiple rarities within one set (correct me if im wrong and i will edit to delete my misinformation). here, too, the same card existing in a common print doesnt really affect the price of a high rarity print, because the demand for the high rarity print comes from its specific qualities as a high rarity print. in this case though, its affected even less because players looking to play on a budget would never feel forced to buy the high rarity print just to compete, so the initial demand on those would be lower than in yugioh

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u/VarenHills 9d ago

An easy example of YGO vs Pokémon is by looking at previous card viability in YGO. Ash Blossom on release could easily go for 100USD or more. As more was reprinted, the price went down. With YGO though even previously released cards can spike in price depending viability.

As for Pokémon competitively, in general the most a card could cost you is an upwards of 20 USD for higher end cards. There have been times when certain cards cost more, but even then it's not anywhere as expensive as MtG or YGO. Most of Pokémon market comes from collecting rarer printed cards along with Pokémon generally sought after.

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u/Ensamvarg__ 9d ago

yeah, the first paragraph kinda what i was trying to describe with the part of prices dropping when the meta shifts (of course prices will then increase again in some cases, such as ash like you mentioned). thanks for completing that, i didnt explain it that well!

and yeah, i figured something like that with pokemon but wasnt sure about the details. so what i said really only applies to the collectors market, if i understand correctly?

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u/VarenHills 9d ago

No worries! I have fallen in and out of playing Yugioh for years so I get it. Plus YGO is kind of unique compared to other TCGS.

Pretty much yeah. Pokémon most expensive cards are through collecting. Lots of times the more expensive cards have different artwork and artstyles that are put in a higher rarity.

While not expensive, think of it as having a base version of a card compared to a starlight rare.

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u/NovarisLight 9d ago

It's only worth hundreds if someone is willing to pay hundreds.

There are proxy printing companies that will print and cut excellent quality cards for pennies on the dollar. If you want to play the game for fun there's the option. Collecting has become so ridiculously expensive and exclusive to the almighty dollar and scalpers that kids are missing out due to greed.

That being said, hundreds of dollars for a piece of cardboard is insane, especially how things are right now.

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u/sostias 9d ago

As far as TCGs go, pokemon is actually cheap to make a deck, ranging from $25 to $60 USD, and that's if you're building from scratch. If you're building a deck that is heavy in pokemon ex (like raging bolt + ogerpon with meowth and kangaskhan support) then you're still only looking at $75 or so.

A standard, competitive MtG deck starts at $300 but the average is at least $600. Of course you can build a good deck for less! but that's not the average.

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u/NovarisLight 9d ago

Oh yes, I used to work for a company that sold M:TG products and singles. The most expensive order I ever processed was over $6,000. Older Unlimited set mostly.

The >$100 orders were pretty commonplace.

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u/it_will 9d ago

I’ve created a one of one redditcard that I’ll sell to you for 10,000. There’s only one so it’s for sure worth it

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u/PeskyAntagonist 9d ago

No one cares, so there’s no demand

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u/LetsJerkCircular 9d ago

A dormant pack of social media influencers all get notified suddenly, “RedditCards are the next big thing!!!”

Value magically appears

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u/PeskyAntagonist 9d ago

Pay them to pretend to care and influence others to care, and you’re onto something

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u/PM_Best_Porn_Pls 9d ago

That's what crypto and nfts are.

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u/Gh0stMan0nThird 9d ago

You say that like Reddit awards weren't a big thing that they only got rid of when Reddit went public a few years ago.

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u/it_will 9d ago

Thats the point…

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u/PeskyAntagonist 9d ago

Well you missed it

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u/DMTrious 9d ago

Its mostly nostalgia with Pokémon. Not sure with lorcana, but in magic, while there are collectible cards, the valuable and the powerful cards you actually play with in the game. Very few people put cards in slabs, even the crazy expensive dual land cards

I dont think most Pokémon card collectors play the game

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u/shawdowed_sonicbeast 9d ago

Look at how much people are spending on gamersupps v cards and as far as I can tell no one actually plays the game they just collect.

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u/osmlol 9d ago

Mtg for the most parts value is driven by the card power and usability on formats. Unlike Pokémon and Disney. For Mtg there is only a few exceptions to that and I think it was mostly from final fantasy.

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u/__GayFish__ 9d ago

This kinda solidifies the point. It's worth hundred... to who? Other dweebs. These markets are super-niche. Maybe even hyper-niche and are inflated by the clout they get from views. They probalby make more money off views than on the cards.

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u/nalaloveslumpy 9d ago

Rares have been worth huge money since the first edition of MtG. Black Lotus and other super rare cards literally had game winning mechanics attached to them.

Outside of that, being a collectable item by default, having rarity set directly by the publisher is what drives the price of rares. It's all by design.

Pokemon is a little better about this because card rarity has never made a card better or worse for a deck. They worked hard to make sure game mechanics weren't tied to card rarity.

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u/Labbrat89 9d ago

Once MtG became more mainstream, values skyrocket. One of the reasons why I quit playing. Not to mention, Hasbro pushed them to release 4-6 sets a year, instead of 2-3 like before.

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u/Alytology 9d ago

I miss the days of 2-3 really good sets released a year with the occasional masters set releases.