Collectible Card “Repacks” are marginally less garbage then people who sell them. Which is to say they’re still pretty garbage.
Time for another card based rant, because nothing fills the content drought like rage and fluff. But it’s not like anyone is going stop me, so I’m posting anyway. Today we’re gonna talk about the absolute garbage that is a repack.
I’ve spent a non-zero portion of time browsing stuff on various sales apps recently, and there’s something that appears a lot of that drives me absolutely insane: repacks masquerading as either singles or actual packs.
Let me say something very simple: REPACKS ARE WORTHLESS. NEVER BUY THEM. If you think that someone is actually going to repack a very expensive chase card into one of their boosters and then sell it under its market value, you have a far more charitable view of human nature then I do.
There are other reasons that repacks are worthless as well. They tend to offer a very low number of cards, and it’s better value to buy singles, or if you really want that lottery ticket experience, to buy actual sealed boosters.
Now, ignoring everything else about why repacks are garbage, there’s something important to understand about why buying repacks from your fellow players is a bad idea. It has to do with the price to buy cards, either sealed, or as singles.
Brick and mortar game stores generally buy products for 50% of the retail price that they sell it to you for. This means that if a booster box is selling for about 130-140 in a game store, the store selling it to you bought it for likely around $70 from the publisher.
The absolute cheapest I have ever seen a booster box sell for is $80. This was a somewhat under the table deal the store had with an individual who supported the store extensively and helped to run events for the game the box was for. That still had a bit of margin built in, as small as it was (LGSs are businesses after all).
In any case, when you buy a repack, you’re likely buying it from one of two places:
A fellow player/collector of the game who bought so much shit they’re trying to make money back by selling all the chaff and other things that they don’t want.
A LGS that cracked boosters, took all the good stuff out to sell to their customers, and was left with a bunch of loose commons no one will ever buy.
In short, you are paying money for the trash someone else doesn’t want, and is now trying to offload.
Now, there’s one other group of folks who might look at these repacks, and potentially see them as a good deal: parents buying cards for their kids. This is the group that’s being taken advantage of here.
I don’t have kids, so I’m not going to make any statement on the difficultly of trying to raise children. Most parents probably have better things to do with their time than to try to understand the minutiae of cardboard cutouts with magic animals on them.
The thing is, if these folks did understand what they were buying, they could still get a better deal for their money. Based on my experience, I cared about two things about a card when I was a kid.
Card is shiny.
Having as many different cards as possible.
If these parents wanted to get the most value for their cash, they could just go onto TCG player, buy a bunch of jank GX/EX/V’s, find a bunch of cards at about a 1$, buy two copies of 10 of those cards, and bam, 20 Ultra Rares for $20. 1 copy for the kid to keep, 1 copy to trade.
Of course, they don’t do this, because they’re more concerned with things like food, shelter, and the ongoing worldwide disaster we’ve been living in for the last two years than cardboard animals.
So when their kid asks for Pokemon cards, and they can’t find any at the store, they go on to whatever digital marketplace they happen to use, search for Pokemon Cards, see these shitty repacks, and go “Alright,” buy them, and then go back to other far more important things.
Anyway. The point is that repacks are scummy, people who sell them are scummy, the “Target audience” is folks who don’t know better, and repackers are bad and should feel bad.
Remember, just because you think monetization models have hit rock bottom doesn’t mean that the business people agree.
This isn’t a full article in any sense, but I’m annoyed, and so I write. This is going to be a brief list of specific games with business models that I hate and/or think are incredibly stupid. In order to be on this list the game had to be at least somewhat released, and do something uniquely and impressively shitty. Blind boxes, overpriced microtransactions, and “Surprise Mechanics” are all very well and good, but the games in this article all looked at those mechanics and went, “We can do worse!”
Axie Infinity
Ah yes. Axie Infinity, otherwise known “Pokemon But On The Blockchain And Worse.” It costs something like $150 (Oops, like $30 now, cuz Crypto) per Axie, and you need 3 just to play, which makes Axie Infinity cost about $90 $450. And fuck the blockchain.
Okay, so before the big Crypto crash recently, these things were a lot more expensive.
Princess and Conquest
Princess and Conquest is a Pornographic Action RPG with Political Simulation elements. I have a writeup on it. While you can just buy the game for like $12, that doesn’t actually get you all the stuff in the game. If you want all the characters, you have to be subscribed to the creator’s Patreon at the $20 a month tier so that when the limited character distributions are done, you can send over you save files to be modified. Also, a good half their updates are also behind a paywall?
Here’s a better idea: I already paid you $12. How about instead you just fucking add the content to the game?
Star Citizen
The true master of NFTs before NFTs existed, Star Citizen has been in development for just about 10 years now! Chris Roberts promised a space MMO with 110 explorable solar systems, hundreds of ships and players, and fidelity unlike anything ever seen. With over $500,000,000 raised over that time period, they’ve delivered a buggy tech demo built in Cryengine with one solar system that doesn’t support more than 30 players in a server. That hasn’t stopped them from selling ships for hundreds of dollars, not all of which are actually in the game, and having a pledge reward tier list that goes up to the $25,000 mark.
None of these actually include the “game package.” You have to buy that separately. I’m also not sure all of these are actually in the game.
Yu-Gi-Oh: Master Duel
Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links had a model for digital TCGs that I actually rather liked. While the prices per nonexistent cards were fairly high, there was a box system where each “Box” of cards had a specific set of cards in it, and after you pulled a given card, it was removed from the box until you chose to reset it. This meant that if you were really after a specific card, you were guaranteed to get it if chose to buy out the whole box. Then, after getting that card, you could reset the box and start again if you so wished. It still cost too much god damn money, but I actually bought a fair amount of boosters for this game when they went on sale, and it was better than most digital TCGs that guarantee you a great big fat fucking nothing.
So it was almost impressive to me how badly Master Duel, a different video game for the exact same card game, choose to do their model.
Instead of having individual boxes that are released in small sets, every single box pulls from the same set of over 6000 or so cards, with higher rates for the “Featured” cards for that box. In addition, if you pull a card of the two highest rarities that correspond to a secret pack, you unlock the ability to buy cards from that secret pack.
But only for 24 hours. And again, only half the cards you get from those secret packs are actually the featured cards, so you might not get shit. I have other problems with Master Duel, like the fact that the general power level for Yu-Gi-Oh makes the speed of MTG’s Vintage format look like a casual draft cube. But the fact that someone looked at limited time gacha draws, and TCGs and went “How can I combine these and make it worse?” earns Konami a big “Fuck You Motherfucker” and Master Duel the 4th slot on this list.
Don’t buy into the hype without reading this first.
I wasn’t quite sure what to title this article. I’m still not sure even as I write it. In any case, the general purpose of this article is mostly to warn anyone who, like myself, has found themselves curious about buying into MetaZoo.
So for starters, let’s quickly define what MetaZoo is. This is a bit difficult, because MetaZoo wants to be a lot of things, but its core is a TCG (Trading Card Game), named, unsurprisingly, Metazoo. It’s this TCG and the elements around it that currently make me nervous about wanting to get involved or buy anything MetaZoo related.
If nothing else, there’s a single massive factor that has turned me off of MetaZoo so far: the several times I’ve actually sat down and tried to play the game, I didn’t actually have very much fun. And I consider that a really bad sign, because I really like card games and trading card games. I’ve played a ridiculous amount of Magic, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh, both in paper and in those games’ digital equivalents. And even when I’ve gotten stomped, even when things have gone wrong, I’ve still had fun. MetaZoo hasn’t been fun.
(A brief aside: MetaZoo, generally speaking, plays like a combo of Pokémon and Magic, using parts of Pokémon’s attack based combat, and Magic’s resource system and life points.)
This is the root of my skepticism of the game. From there, my skepticism grows when I start to look at everything else around the game’s ecosystem. Right now MetaZoo feels like it cares more about making as much money as feasibly possible than trying to grow and become a fun game.
There are a lot of examples of this, and so I’m just going to go through them in no particular order.
The MetaZoo NFT
There’s an official MetaZoo NFT. Because of course there is. Here’s the link to the OpenSea page. And here’s the link to the page the token was sold on. The long and short of it seems to be, “There’s a plan in the future to use these to give exclusive access to discounts and presales on future products!” For reference, each of these tokens cost a minimum of 0.3 ETH to mint, and CoinBase has Eth listed at about $4,500 for the date this was going on. But if you bought during the presale, “During the minting process, certain errors occurred! These error tokens include a damaged Jersey Devil Purple token, a double stamped Mothman Gold token, and other eccentricities that are significantly rarer than their properly minted counterparts. These error tokens will only be circulated during the presale event.” So, lets be clear: A MINIMUM of $1500 for the potential future ability to… purchase a blind box T-Shirt at presale. And maybe other undetermined benefits!
What incredible fucking value. They sold 2300-ish of these things.
Blind Box… Everything
You know those blind box T-shirts that the token above got you presale access to? Yeah, so, those are $50 a box. Each box contains… 1 T-shirt and a Promo card. I could almost understand getting a specific T-shirt and random Promo, but why would I buy a random T-shirt I don’t even want? And a single promo card? They also had blind box pins and promo cards available at one point. Oh, and “1 out of every 40 boxes contains a Super Rare T-shirt and promo card featuring the Nightcrawler and all 6 iconic MetaZoo characters!” You may be starting to see a pattern here: limited exclusivity everything, with lots of hidden and random promos, at ridiculous prices… but if you don’t buy now, they might sell out!
Playing Card Kickstarter
So, with the world in the absolute shitter, and supply lines being what they are, if you actually want to play MetaZoo, it’s a bit difficult. The first MetaZoo Kickstarter raised about $18,000 to do the print run of the cards. So the MetaZoo team recently ran a second fundraising campaign to… print playing cards.
It has raised, at time of writing… $1,520,596. Let’s be clear: this isn’t for copies of the actual TCG cards, it’s for decks of normal playing cards with art from the MetaZoo game/franchise on them. Of course, these decks also come with special blind box boosters, and if you pledge at the $1150 tier, you’ll get a special promo, one of only 250!
You can’t though, because all those slots are already taken.
The point I’m trying to make here is that this company and community currently seems more interested in capitalizing on fear of missing out, impulsive collectors, and maintaining hype in the secondary market than their actual card game.
The Actual Game
Okay, so that’s enough about MetaZoo for now. Let’s talk about Magic: The Gathering for a moment, and some of the worst designed Magic cards ever printed. Specifically, the set of cards known as the Power Nine. These 9 cards are banned in virtually every format, and the only format that they can be played in, Vintage, only allows you to use a single copy of ONE of them in your deck. They are obscenely powerful with no downside, and have massive format warping potential. It’s actively admitted that it was a “Mistake” to print cards at this power level by the game’s designers.
Because of this, these cards have never been reprinted, exist in fairly small amounts, and are also some of the most expensive magic cards ever. For reference, at time of writing, the “Cheapest” Black Lotus on eBay is about $15,000. (Interestingly, a brief look at some older price guides show how much the cost has gone up. One price guide from 2002 has it at $300 at the time.)
In short, the Power Nine are incredibly valuable, while being toxic to the game of Magic if ever used in play. They are the poster child of “Cards you do not print” while designing a Magic-like card game. Of those 9 cards, 6 are mana rocks. These are the Moxes, and Black Lotus.
So why am I harping on about poorly designed early Magic cards in a article about MetaZoo?
This is why.
I mentioned up above that MetaZoo in many ways plays like a combination of Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering. And one of the things it takes from Magic is Magic’s resource system. You can play one “Aura” card per turn, you “fatigue” it to generate resources, and you “unfatigue” it at the start of your turn, just like Magic’s lands.
MetaZoo has a cycle of zero-cost cards for each element that look like this.
There’s one of these for each “Color” that can be played in MetaZoo, but they all function the same. A zero cost card that taps for 2 Aura.
Now, if you’re looking at this, and going “Wait a minute, that’s more or less just a cycle of strictly better Moxes,” then you’re thinking the same thing that I was when I when first saw them.
And this is another major reason I’m skeptical of the intentions of the MetaZoo team. Magic is close to 30 years old, and in those 30 years, the Power Nine have not been reprinted. While you could argue this is because of collectors, or fears of sullying the market, I’d argue that the core reason is different: the Power Nine ruin the game.
So if you’re making a brand new card game, why would you create more powerful versions of some of the worst designed TCG cards ever made? I can think of two reasons. Reason one is because you’ve never played another collectible card game before.
Reason two is because as you release your brand new card game, you want to immediately invoke FOMO by referencing the most infamous and expensive cards from the world’s most popular TCG.
From what I’ve written in the rest of the article, you can likely see which one I think is more likely. (Although neither are confidence inspiring)
This the vibe that seems to permeate MetaZoo for me. Underneath the wonderful artwork and 90’s video game box art vibe there’s a persistent drumbeat of “Fear of Missing Out,” “It only goes up,” and “Buy now! Limited edition!” This doesn’t feel the work of a team trying to create the most fun game that they can. It feels like someone trying to create a new version of the Beanie Baby craze, or Pokemon that they can cash in on.
And it’s why I’m currently very hesitant of engaging any further with the game or brand. If you’re looking at MetaZoo and going “Huh, that seems neat, I wonder if I can get some boosters,” I urge you to reconsider.
Stop being concerned about the Square Enix letter, please.
I’m not sure how to start this brief writeup, but that’s okay. Anyway, now that we have a starting sentence, have you read the investor letter from Square Enix’s president? Here’s a link to the actual letter.
This letter has a lot of people hot and bothered, because it has terms in it like “NFT” and “Blockchain.” A large number of people are acting like he announced that the Square Enix servers will be powered by harvesting life energy from the Earth and that he’s renaming the company Shinra.
This interpretation is incredibly stupid for a variety of reasons, but it makes me think that people, perhaps understandably, don’t quite know how to read this sort of letter.
Brief diatribe. I think NFTs in their current implementation are fairly stupid. The idea of exchangeable digital property? Kind of neat. Everything about how they currently work, including the lack of oversight/controls, massive wastes of power, use for money laundering, and general pointlessness? Miserable, awful, needs to die in a fire.
Anyway, we’re talking about this specific type of letter. See, the purpose of a letter to investors is more or less to just buoy investor confidence. It’s not directed at consumers. If you do not care about SQENIX’s stock price, there is no reason to care about the content of this letter. Buy their games, products, and services based on what they actually release, at release. As a result, these letters tend to be filled with the appropriate buzzwords and terminology to signal to investors that the company leadership has their finger on the pulse of the industry.
As an example of this, I want to bring up the 2017 letter from the Chairman. In this letter, you’ll see extensive reference to virtual reality, augmented/alternate reality, and the key importance of smartphones. Why are they talking about Augmented Reality even though they haven’t ever made a augmented reality game? Simple. Because Pokémon Go came out in 2016 and made a godscrillion dollars while being a worldwide fucking phenomenon for several months.
So, with that as the context, let’s go back and dissect the actual letter with the framing, and the offending paragraphs that have people so annoyed.
Paragraphs 1 & 2 are primarily fluff about the concept of the “Metaverse.” They end with the following line.
As this abstract concept begins to take concrete shape in the form of product and service offerings, I am hoping that it will bring about changes that have a more substantial impact on our business as well.
Yosuke Matsuda, 2022 Letter from the Chairman
No promises. No commitment or statement of investment. Just 2 paragraphs of fluff that if these concepts transition into actual products and services instead of a pipe dream, they may impact the gaming and entertainment industry.
Paragraph 3 is the spicy one that actually talks about NFT’s.
However, we do observe examples here and there of overheated trading in NFT-based digital goods with somewhat speculative overtones, regardless of the observed value of the content provided
Yosuke Matsuda, 2022 Letter from the Chairman
In case anyone is wondering how you say “Right now the value of any of this is massively fucking inflated, and the things being sold are pretty much worthless” in this sort of letter, here you go.
Paragraphs 4 & 5 touch on AI technology and cloud services. Of these, only paragraph 4 includes any actual statement of action, noting that the company has established SQUARE ENIX AI & ARTS Alchemy Co., Ltd. with a stated goal of R&D on AI.
5, 6 & 7 are all about token economies/crypto. They’re the second set of paragraphs that have people annoyed, and so I’m going to break them down a little bit here. I don’t actually agree with some of the concepts espoused here, but I’m gonna put my thoughts at the end.
Paragraph 5 is mostly a definition of the concept of “Play to Earn”, Blockchain-based games, and their theoretical differences from standard game development.
Paragraph 6 is, interestingly enough, the most consumer focused paragraph of the whole thing. I think this paragraph is attempting to make the case that there is value in the technical space that has been opened by Crypto. I think this paragraph is trying to win over people like myself who don’t like Crypto.
Paragraph 7 is the densest section of the letter, and has multiple concepts. Again, I encourage you to read the letter yourself, first from your own perspective, and then from the perspective of someone who is financially invested in Square Enix. I will likely not cover all aspects of it.
Loosely, I would summarize it as follows:
People play games for multiple reasons, which in some cases include modding, creative expression, and gold farming. Traditionally, gaming structures do not have built-in methods for rewarding those types of players.
The technology around Blockchain-based design, and social acceptance is currently mature enough to support creating games that do reward those types of players.
Square Enix will continue to observe these changes, and will move to expand their portfolio of entertainment products to include what they define here as “Decentralized Games” if they think they can make money off it, which could include systems that financially reward those types of players.
8 is a generic wrap-up, and acknowledges the worldwide pandemic. Nothing too special here.
So, that’s the letter. It contains some overviews and definitions of some trendy topics in the video game sphere of business. It has a single concrete statement of action about AI for something they already did in march of 2020.
PS: I really do not agree with the definition of Decentralized Gaming presented in this letter. If the fundamental technology stack that is needed to actually run and play a video game from a technical standpoint is not actually freely available and modifiable, you have not created a decentralized game. You have simply created a game that uses Blockchain/a decentralized database as a repository for user game objects. But hey, that’s just my opinion. It remains to be seen if it ages like wine, or like my high school quote about how “The iPad will be a failure because it doesn’t support Flash”.
Right now, something very interesting is happening. So what am I talking about? Is it the global pandemic? The fact that we’re finally making progress with immunizations? The massive change in working remote or working from home? Or perhaps it’s the new presidental administration.
Well, no. Those things are all happening, but I’m talking about the fact that the cost of buying sealed packages of Pokemon cards has almost doubled or trippled in price. In this writing/video/whatever, I’m going to talk about why I think that is, and why I think a lot of people have the wrong idea. For those already familar with the Pokemon Trading Card Game, or TCG as it’s often shortened to, skip ahead a bit to the reasons. For everyone else, I want to provide a little bit of quick background.
Background on the Pokemon Trading Card Game Pokemon, for those who might not know is a global media franchise that started as a video game, and at this point has branched out into almost every conceivable product you could imagine. In terms of popularity, Pokemon is often quoted as the most profitable franchise in the world, above things like Star Wars, or Marvel, or Micky Mouse.
The Pokemon Trading Card Game is a collectible card game. For the purpose of this discussion, it’s not important to know too much about it, except for two brief things.
The first is that cards are released in “Sets”. You can think of them like seasons of a TV show. Each set has a specific number of different cards in it, at various rarities. The second thing to know is that a single “Set” may contain multiple copies of cards that are mechanically identical, which is to say when used as part of game, they function exactly the same, but they have different artwork. Here’s an example, with a card named Charizard V. The first image is the normal version, the second is the full art version. The full art version is much rarer. Finally, there’s a shiny version, the one that’s black. It’s actually from a different set, but we’ll talk about that later. The key point here is that from a gameplay standpoint, all of these cards are identical, and there is no in game advantage to using one over the other.
And finally, a little bit of background on pricing. Generally speaking, a Pack of Pokemon Cards retails at $4.00 MSRP(Mass Suggested Retail Price, IE, what a Target/Walmart will sell the product for on release.) for a single booster. A booster box, a collection of 36 boosters, retails at about $140 dollars, but generally speaking, when a set releases, it’s not hard to find a booster box for $90 to $100 dollars on either eBay or Amazon. There are also Fat Packs. These tend to retail at $30 to $40, and contain 10 booster packs.
One other quick thing to note: Buying products at MSRP for those of us who are addictsenthusiasts is fairly rare. We usually have connections, either with stores, or online distributors that, as mentioned above, sell below MSRP.
End of Background
All right, so with that background out of the way, lets get into the current state of things, by looking at how much booster boxes cost for several of the last few sets of cards.
Name
Price – USD
Battle Styles (Not released at time of writing)
$147 eBay, $160 Amazon
Vivid Voltage
$197 eBay, $208 Amazon
Rebel Clash
$150 eBay, 190 Amazon
Darkness Ablaze
$172 eBay, $180 Amazon
Sword and Shield
$200 eBay, $190 Amazon
Keep in mind, these are all products with an MSRP of $140, and that generally speaking only ever cost $80-$90 dollars in reality.
Now, people who already follow the scene might notice something missing here, and I’ll get to that in a moment.
Name
Price – USD
Shining Fates Fat Pack (10 Packs)
$100 to $150 eBay, $123 Amazon
Champions Path Fat Pack (10 Packs)
$100 on Amazon, $95 on eBay
Now for anyone who plays the Pokemon Trading card game, I’d like to make a brief note: I bought a playset of all non-reprint cards in Champions Path. It cost me $133. That’s 4 copies of every single card in the set, that hadn’t printed before.
So, whats going on here? Why are these booster packs so expensive? What happened?
And for anyone who thinks “Well, thats just capitalism” here’s the offical statement from pokemon.com. So clearly, they’re not in love with this either.
Ed Note: And why would they be? As they’re the publisher/distributor, they don’t make extra money if the price people are willing to pay goes up, if they’re not the one setting the price.
I have two general guesses here, one for the first set of cards, and one for the second. They overlap a bit, but lets start with the ones above.
So, lets talk about the dates here. While the official announcement on the site has been updated since then, articles about the announcement start showing up on Feb 11th.
So why is this date important? Well, because Feb 11th is the day right before the start of Chinese New Year.
For anyone who hasn’t had things manufactured in China, Chinese New Year is effectively a full shutdown period. And this year, it won’t be over until Febuary 22nd. It’s a public holiday, and a very big one, and you can expect factory shutdowns for approximately two weeks. So, what that actually means is that factories will likely be shutdown until February 26th, the day I’m writing this article.
Now, despite what we might believe, even global megacorporation’s are limited by the laws of reality, including the fact that if you want to ship this stuff via boat from China where it’s printed, to the rest of the world, you’re going to be looking at a timeline of about 3 months.
With this info, we can start to make some guesses about what’s going on here, and to make some predictions involving future timelines. But before we get into that, lets talk about three more parts of this perfect storm.
Charizard, Coronavirus, and the 25th Anniversary
This year is the 25th Anniversary of the Pokemon Franchise. As part of this, there’s been a general marketing push with things like a Post-Malone concert, Katy Perry, and other things that I think might have pushed Pokemon a little bit more into the limelight then it might have been otherwise. I don’t think it would have been hugely noticed if it wasn’t for the fact that we’re all stuck at home, with no ability to go anywhere or do anything. But a large portion of this push has probally pulled up a bit of nostalgia.
And this brings us Charizard. Charizard is a large fire dragon Pokemon. It tends to be one of the more visible and identifiable members of the franchise, and it also has the interesting distinction of being one of, if not, the most valuable mass market card ever available. Currently, base set shadow-less Charizard’s go for $5000 to $10000. And perfect ones can go for over $200,000. And currently, many of these sets that have just released feature Charizard’s new form, Charizard VMAX. This is the first time this Pokemon has been featured on a card.
And finally, we have coronavirus. Parents are staying home from work, and trying to entertain kids. Large numbers of people are on unemployment or furloughed, looking desperately for anything they can use to get a bit of extra money or scrape by. And we’ve had a wave of publicity about how profitable scalping can be recently with things like graphics cards and game consoles.
Oh, and one more thing.
Most Pokemon Cards are effectively worthless.
You won’t hear most collectors say this, and you won’t hear it brought up often, but it’s a simple fact that should be acknowledged. When you buy a sealed pack of Pokemon cards, odds are that the price of buying the cards in the booster pack are lower then the price of buying the cards individually. Even for the most recent sets, commanding ridiculous prices, the common/uncommon/rare cards in those sets go for 5 to 20 cents. It’s why I was able to buy a full playset of these cards for $133. The only cards worth over a few dollars are the hyper-rares, cards that present in less then 1-3 sealed packs, and of those, only the full arts and alt arts are really worth cash, and those tend to be present at about 1 in 36 rates, and NOT EVEN ALL OF THOSE ARE EXPENSIVE.
Buying sealed Pokemon Cards is a gamble, and statistically you will not get your value back. For kids, to whom every card is special, this isn’t a huge problem. For adults, who can just buy the cards they want, this shouldn’t be a problem, unless you really like gambling, and opening boosters.
Which a lot of folks do.
Lets put these pieces together, and see what happened.
So here’s what I think might have actually happened, based on the things I’ve laid out above. From this point onward, we’re venturing into purely speculation. Pretty much everything I’ve put above is a verifiable fact, and I’m more then happy to fix them if folks find errors.
Coronavirus and Shipping Delays result is less cards being generally available then usual, in addition to smaller game stores suffering heavily from the lack of foot traffic, leading to less orders of product in general.
Hype around the 25th anniversary of Pokemon leads to a higher level of brand awareness, along with the fairly lucrative scalping that we’ve seen previously last year and this year.
A set of cards is printed at a very high rarity, of a Pokemon with a history of being fairly collectible, and commanding obscenely high prices, and knowledge of this begins to leak out.
The incredibly low rate of actually getting this card leads to everyone involved who wants the card, from scalpers to collectors buying up as much of the product as possible for a chance of getting it.
This becomes public knowledge, and now even folks who weren’t interested are getting involved in the hype, or trying to get stuff before it sells out. Effectively, what we saw with toilet paper before.
The simple realities of production in China, combined with Chinese New Year, international lockdowns, and all of the above means that there is no easy way to rapidly increase supply of product on a quick timescale.
So where does that leave us? Well, I started writing this article on the 26th, and it’s now the 15th. The prices of most sealed products show no sign of slowing down. And the simple reality of what it takes to manufacture more cards mean that we’re still likely several months out from increased supply. If we assume that TPCI (The Pokemon Company International) decided to try to increase supply as of the date that they made the official announcement of being aware that consumers were being hit by shortages, they still wouldn’t have started production until 2/26.
And since boats can only go so fast, we likely won’t see any difference in supply for at least the next three months, meaning that speculation, hoarding, and other junk will likely continue until June/July, as just having something showing up at port doesn’t mean it’s available to buy.
This is my personal theory. I don’t think YouTube personalities opening cards, or folks posting on Twitter caused this. I think it’s a combo of a heavily impacted supply chain, hype, and chaos.
So until that time, enjoy, and buy singles if you’re gonna buy at all.
