The State of the Pokémon TCG
A personal opinion on the state of the Pokémon TCG in 2023, from the perspective of a collector.
As a child I had so much fun going to the store to buy some Pokémon cards, taking booster packs and theme decks home and opening them up to see what kind of awesome cards I would get. Whether it was the holographic Dragonite from the Fossil set, or a first edition Ampharos and Slowking from Neo Genesis, I would be so thrilled by them. They’d go into a folder, and I’d stare at them for hours, admiring the amazing artwork and being surprised at my luck in finding some really cool cards. I would create a deck with them and play the game with a friend. I usually always lost, but I had tons of fun doing it! However, in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have seen a shift among fellow trading card fans, with the love of collecting and playing the trading card game for fun seeming to decrease.
Pulling a card from a packet of Neo Revelation and finding a holo Misdreavus card would have originally been an exciting experience, but that excitement now seems to be focused on how much money can be made from selling the card on an auction website. Rather than looking at a card’s beautiful artwork, the focus is now on it’s centring. Why bother reading what’s on the front, when the whitening on the back tells the story of its perceived value? The journey began with achieving a complete set, and now ends with a grading company as its final destination.
But who am I to dictate how people enjoy the Pokémon Trading Card Game? I’m not some gatekeeper telling people how to enjoy their hobbies, and if you’re offended by what I am saying, I’m sad for you. I would ask that you spare a thought for the biggest losers here: the younger Pokémon fans who want to experience the game and the joy of collecting, who are finding it more challenging due to the selfish adults with a financial incentive to buy up all the cards as soon as they go on sale, moving from store to store with no care for anything except their greedy pockets. Suddenly I feel lucky to have grown up during a time and in a place where this wasn’t the reality.
Before writing this feature, I also considered if I really could begrudge someone for wanting to make some money by selling off their collections or flipping cards for profit during a global financial crisis. Is that fair of me? As people get older and have families, maybe it’s a necessary sacrifice to make in order to pay bills, buy a car, or in some cases, rare and expensive cards could be sold in order to place a deposit down on a new home! Of course, I am not saying that we should have compassion for the deliberate scalpers here. Maybe the finger of blame should be pointed at companies instead of individuals? How about a certain fast food restaurant who didn’t train their staff to limit the number of trading cards they could hand out? Or perhaps those brick and mortar and online stores could enforce a strict limit on the number of products that can be purchased?
Or, maybe it's The Pokémon Company themselves who should be blamed for not providing enough prints, so everyone could have a chance to own that seventeenth reverse promo Charizard they decide to release that year? Keeping cards in print for longer, and making older sets easier to obtain, could give people a chance to complete them. It would also be great to see individual cards sold separately through official platforms to help those who are close to completing their collections, the opportunity to do so.
Perhaps all of this doesn’t really matter at all, and perhaps this grumpy old man is just shouting at things, out of touch, bitter that he can’t complete his own collection, and complaining that the world is not the way it used to be. Who is going to truly care where profit is concerned anyway? I guess it’s back to the coffee shop to moan about it all with my friend, and chat about the good ol’ days over a cup of hot chocolate and a folder of vintage Pokémon cards, remembering how good things used to be.
I was at the local gamestore yesterday and this kid who might have been 9 or 10, had a phone out and was checking the prices of the cards he was pulling.
It made me sad.
I never really collected the cards myself but the stories I've heard about scalping today are pretty nuts. It's absolutely a pretty sorry state of things if kids can't get cool cards of the Pokémon they like because scalpers are driving around buying up the entire stock as soon as it arrives at the stores.
Scalping in general is a pretty net-negative activity. The scalper isn't adding any kind of value to the system, just profiting off the fact the company refuses to raise the prices of the cards to meet the demand (which of course they refuse to, because if they did then kids would *never* be able to afford them - though of course ideally they should print more to meet the demand at lower prices instead). I can't judge an individual who does it to put food on the table, but if there were no scalping in the world it would unambiguously be a better place.