Over the weekend, a PSA 10 Gengar VMAX Full Art sold on eBay for a staggering $5,000. This is almost definitely fake. A not-so-subtle attempt to manipulate the Pokemonꦯ card market by inflating the price of a specific card in order to increase the market value of the entire supply.
One person faking the sale of one card isn’t going to have much of an impact, but what if a lot of people were doing it, all the time, in a wide variety of ways, many of whic๊h make no logical senseꦗ? If you take a look at the other recent sales of PSA 10 Gengar VMAXs, they’re all going for $700-800. The fake $5,000 sale didn’t manipulate the market, because it’s already been manipulated.
Gengar VMAX is a great card, to be fair, and there are legitimate reasons it’s fetching such a high price right now. Thanks to the standard set rotation in April, the majority of Sword & Shield era cards rotated out, meaning there’s no chance for additional print runs of those cards in the future. When this happened, quite a few cards shot up in value, including Gengar VMAX. This is a normal, predictable occurrence, but what isn’t normal is how much the value of these cards have increased.
Pokemon Twilight Masquerade Review: Let's Mask Up And Throw Down
One of the strongest themes seen in a Poke𝔍mon TCG expansion in years.
Th꧑e card everyone has their eyes on right now is Evolving Skies’ Umbreon VMAX Alternate Art, AKA Moonbreon. Moonbreon was the most expensive card from Evolving Skies when it launched in 2021, and over the years we’ve seen its price slowly decline, until it bottomed out🎶 at around $500 last October. Since then, its value has been on the rise.
In February, the price took a sharp increase, and it’s been skyrocketing ever since. This month, the first ungraded Moonbreon sold for over $1,000. This has had a significant knock-on effect for other Evolving Skies chase cards, like the Rayquaza VMAX Altern꧅ate Art, which has doubled in value༒ from $250 to $500 in just the last month.
So what’sꦚ going on? No one really knows exactly. Peter Day over at TCGPlayer Infinite , specifically buyouts, and how they’re affecting the price of so many Pokemon cards right now.
Day highlights a few of the cards that are mysteriously trending upward and is able to show the points at which targeted buyout campaigns - someone buying up all the available stock in order to corner the market on a card and raise the price - have been effective, and when they haven’t. Tꦍhe article highlights a variety of cards including some that have rotated out, some that haven’t, and some that are so new and readily available that no modest buy-out attempt should have had any longer-term effect. And yet in at least one case, Magikarp Illustration Rare from Paldea Evolved, it has.
Day’s conclusion - and that of everyone else watching the Pokemon market - is that we’re simply still in the Pokemon card boom that began during the pandemic. Prices are still moving up and down in unexpected, unex💙plainable ways, and the mix of speculation, nostalgia, and hype is pushing the value of a lot of cards unbelievably high. There’s just no accounting for all the different forces pushing and pulling on the market right now.
For every dumb scheme to pretend to sell a Gengar for $5,000, a hundred other little schemes are going unnoticed, subtly pushing things in unexpected directions. On top of that, there’s a lot of people that are, apparently, simply willing to pay $100 for a random Magikarp. It’s the wild west out here for Pokemon collectors. I recommend you check your Sword & Shieldౠ collection. It might only be a few years old, but you could be sitting on a gold mine.
Pokemon TCG's Shrouded Fable Elite Trainer Box Pre-Orders Are Now Available
You can secure a special edition Pokemon Center versio⛦n of the box, which includes two add🐭itional booster packs, right now.
