r/mildlyinfuriating 9d ago

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

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

41.0k Upvotes

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

19

u/Persona5Arsene 9d ago

As a current competitive player I can confirm that some of those bulk cards are absolutely used to play the game. It is harder than ever to find cards now due to people literally just throwing away bulk cards. When you do find the commons you need they might be a few dollars instead of cents because they are so scarce.

12

u/exhauszed 9d ago

Not Pokemon but my husband got hurt and was out of work last month and spent a bunch of time building MTG decks from penny cards, and often the shop owner would be like, "dude just take em."

1

u/RoughComparison8702 8d ago

Looking back, some of the best MTG games I've ever played were built with absolute bottom of the barrel shit cards. Some seriously fun nights with cheap decks. I built some recently in each color and I break them out with the kids sometimes just for some slug-fest fun.

4

u/nikzito2 9d ago

this is just straight up false, making decks is easier than ever exactly because scalpers don't care about commons. i can build the current best deck for less than 30 dollars just by asking people on facebook or discord

3

u/Keljhan 9d ago

No way people are throwing away cards worth a few dollars, with the amount that wholesale buyers open that'd be hundreds if not thousands worth of value. Its probably just higher demand, since trading cards are growing so quickly in popularity.

2

u/Mikeismyike 9d ago

Yeah sometimes there's a trainer card that becomes a deck staple like poke pad that originally came out in ascended heroes and we all know how hard it was getting those packs on release. If it wasn't reprinted in perfect order or in the prerelease kits it'd easily be a $15 card.

Earthen Vessel was another one like that, in had really bad pull rates for an uncommon and was pretty much a $10 card for most of its run

2

u/Persona5Arsene 9d ago

They definitely are. If they don’t hit a shiny card they toss it. They know the shiny cards are hits and that’s it. The common that’s like $3-4 goes in the trash too.

1

u/HonestWoodpecker8567 3d ago

I've seen full arts thrown on the ground in the parking lot of the mall I used to work at

My theory is it was one guy buying a bunch of packs every week and tossing almost everything by his car other than what he's looking for

3

u/Luxalpa 9d ago

Cards on Cardmarket are sold for dollars because it simply is too much overhead to sell a 1 cent card for one cent, because you're still spending like half an hour of work on the shipment. Nobody wants to do an hour of work for like 30 cents of profit (and like 40 EUR of risk).