It's literally a card game. You can argue the utility and use case are stupid, or wildly less than the cost would suggest, but it's silly to say there is no utility, even if most collectors don't play the game.

But as soon as you play the game with them, they immediately devalue.

It's just gambling and a greater fool dependent market all over again.

Also, I don't know a single person that actually enjoys playing the game. There are no popular online pokemon card games (like MTG or Board Game Arena).

Pokemon company did a terrible job designing and evolving the game itself..

That's blatantly wrong. PTCGL is the online card game, you don't hear much about it because it's basically free and there's no strong incentive to market it to you.

In person, the competitive scene in western countries is larger than MTG right now, and on the same scale as Riftbound. In Japan it's always been the biggest by an order of magnitude. The two big western open entry tournaments, EUIC / NAIC, sell out ~4,000 player tickets in a matter of seconds. Regionals tournaments that happen almost twice a month throughout the year sell out ~2K-3K player tickets in a matter of minutes.

yet, its wildly popular in stores.

What TPC is doing good is, that they have a special kids format with an age-barrier, so kids wont get outpriced that bad and have a fun interaction with a peer group of the same age. I love how my MTG Store has special Tournament Hours only for the Kids Qualifier groups, so that there are no Neckbeards around trying to take advantage of kids and their understanding for money, the game or god knows what ive experienced in my early YGO days playing against people that were 20 years older than me.

Sure some parents have deeper pockets than others, but you can manage to play the game with a tight budget, depending on the format.

Pokemon TCG Pocket which uses a modified ruleset and its own card sets designed for fast games on mobile devices earned over a billion dollars in its first year before slowing down.

Then there is the official online simulator which is not monetized at all and not used for competitive events so there is no reason for them to market it as a product like its mobile game sister.

What about value driven by format legality? A lot of magic cards are valuable for format specific reasons.

My understanding is that Pokémon is surprisingly cheap if you want to actually play the game as they reprint staples to oblivion (often <100$ for tier one decks). It’s all collection based , which in and of itself is not necessarily an indictment on the value of Pokémon cards, but is much closer to greater fool theory than I’m comfortable with .

The main reason is that these days every rare collectible card in Pokémon is an alternate version of a cheaper card from the same set. For example, N's Zoroark ex ASC 286/217 is a $120 card, but the same set has a more common, mechanically identical $1 card numbered 137/217.

This is very much intended so that collectors chasing the nice full art / textured rare cards flood the second hand market with the less desirable cheaper versions. Players can then easily buy those cards for almost nothing and with ample volume available.

This is an awful take as beanie babies were always predicted to be collectors items but failed to reach that status.

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.

It's kind of funny to see the Pokemon card vending machines at various grocery stores.

Today I went to a hardware store, and was humourously-surprised to find a Pokemon card vending machine there too.

It is gambling, with some valuable "pulls" and intermediate steps that grant a plausible non-gambling veneer (such as having to sell the card on eBay instead of just pocketing money, etc.)

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.

we have one of those by our office and it's funny how every day it says sold out but there's never really anyone there.

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.

The card vending machines are effectively rate limited, you need to wait to make a purchase. This is so one person can't empty the entire machine, even if they have multiple payment methods.

What incentive is there for the machine operators to do this?

Not getting yelled at most likely. There are enough vocal people who complain if these machines do not act "fair". So it often is easier just to change how they operate and not have to listen as much of that.

Before the rate limiting, there were physical confrontations around the restock time. Spreading it out prevents them.

It also works better for the stores that host those machines, where they are supposed to draw in customers, if cards are randomly available throughout the day as opposed never available.

> was humourously-surprised to find

I see. How would you describe the expression on your face, at this point in time? Perhaps, compared to one of the popular characters?

> without any utility or valid use case whatsoever.

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.

Except very few of the cards that are so expensive are even used in the card game for real battles. And the shiny / fancy ones have plain counterparts that would do the same thing in a battle.

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)

> 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.

A lot of the people paying the price of a car for a piece of mass produced cardboard aren’t doing it just because it looks nice they are treating it as an investment much like the man featured in the article when he bought the cards in the 2000’s, only difference is he could buy collections in bulk for hundreds of pounds while individual cards are going for thousands of pounds now.

> Except very few of the cards that are so expensive are even used in the card game for real battles.

Underseat floatation devices are rarely used. Do they have no utility whatsoever, as was claimed upthread for all pokemom cards?

The spendy cards don't have utility to match their price, but the commons are fine. If it's correct that all of the spendy cards have cheap equivalents, that's great for everyone. Nobody has to feel like they need to spend big money to get a black lotus and hope they don't damage it in use.

> it's glorified cock fighting for kids

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.

Infinite theoretical printing supply. In reality, that specific really cool Charizard from my childhood stopped being printed decades ago, and natural wear and tear reduces the supply compared to 1999 (or whenever it was printed). Nostalgia kicks in, demand skyrockets. I don't know why Pokemon specifically did this, but it's far from the first trading card series to have this effect.

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.

Yea that Charizard stopped being printed decades ago; however 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. I don't think demand in this case is nostalgia driven - it seems more likely that the heavy presence of scalpers making it difficult for average people to acquire product at MSRP has been causing the demand to skyrocket, in addition to celebrities like Jake Paul hype streaming.

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.

> it seems more likely that the heavy presence of scalpers making it difficult for average people to acquire product at MSRP has been causing the demand to skyrocket, in addition to celebrities like Jake Paul hype streaming.

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.

I can buy a print of the Mona Lisa at the museum gift shop. Or hire an artist to paint a duplicate that only a few experts with specialized tools can tell apart from the original.

Works of art are still going up in value.

>infinite printing supply

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.

I vaguely remember reading an article at the height of the Nintengo cartridges valuation craze a few years back, that the guys behind the "grading" corporation which produced these insane valuations, were previously convicted scammers who went bust in dotcom and decided to try again.

This whole story about assigning millions of dollars of value based on a state of ten cents worth of cardboard and shrink wrap is craziness. Same with obsessing about the imperfections on the playing cards.