Selling Rare Pokemon Cards Has Never Been More Fruitful, Or More Painful

Have you ever heard of the PSA Vault? There’s a storage facility in Delaware with some of the most sophisticated security systems in the world that holds more than 750,000 trading cards. When you get a card graded by PSA, you can have it sent directly to the vault where it will be stored and protected, and when you’re ready to🎃 sell it on eBay, that transaction is fully facilitated through the vault. All day, people are buying and selling that they’ve never once touched or seen in real life, and never will.

Marley stands in the road with her Arcanine as the sun sets in Pokemon.

ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚEnough Pokémon Cards Have Been Sold To Circle The Globe Over 3 Million Times

That's a whole lot of Pokémon cards.

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As a lifelong fan, there’s a part of me that’s happy to see Pokemon thriving right now. There isn’t a lot of children’s entertainment that gets more popular after 25 years, and it’s so cool to see parents bonding with their kids over their shared love of Pokemon. But at the same time, I hate to see how many people are just in it for the money, treating Pokemon cards like a (somehow less volatile) stock market, and suck♚ing all of the joy and community out of the hobby.

The Overcommodification Of Pocket Monsters

umbreon vmax moonbreon pokemon card. — via Pokemon

I’m not a hardliner when it comes to buying and selling stuff you own. Card games are an expensive hobby, and for a🍸 lot of people, especially competitive players, selling hits is the only way they can afford to remain active in the games they love. Ultimately, tradinꦅg cards are designed to be traded, and that includes trading your cards for someone else’s money.

But when it comes to Pokemon, I think we can all agree things have gotten out of control. People are 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:fistfighting in the aisles of Costco over shiny cardboard. Game stores are getting robbed, and the thieves aren’t even touching the registers. A card featuring Pikachu with a funny hat almost caused a r🌼iot at the Van Gog🌞h museum. When kids aren’t able to get Pokemon cards because thousand𒉰s of eBay sellers treat camping outside of Walmart waiting for restocks as a full-time job, we have a serious problem.

My coping strategy since all of this kicked off in 2020 has been to simply stay out of it. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I opeꦐn packs and build my ༺little collection, I watch competitive matches at events like NAIC and the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:World Championship, and I quietly enjoy꧂ the TCG with friends and ཧavoid every urge to get sucked into the price hype surrounding every new set. I rarely buy singles, and I never sell.

I Almost Never Sell

The Paldean Fates Charizard ex Special Illustration Rare from the Pokemon TCG.

Now’s the part where I tell you I’ve abandoned my values and become part of the problem. As I plan for my wedding next year and work to stave off medical debt, I recently made the difficult decision to part with a💛 small piece of my collection. My research revealed that more than a few of my cards have spiked in value over the last year, including a PSA 10 shiny Mew ex, AKA Bubble Mew - my first-ever graded card.

I’m extremely sentimental about my cards, and I have many I plan to hold onto until the day I die. Bubble Mew is not one of them, and at a $900 market val🦄ue, well, a groom’s gotta do what a groom’s gotta do.

Thus began my first hesitant step into the Pokemon card market. I was able to sell around a dozen cards to a friend from my loca🌜l game store, which was the best-case scenario for me, but Bubble Mew was out of her price range, so it was off to the usual spots: eBay, Marketplace, and Facebook’s Poཧkemon TCG buy & sell groups.

Before listing Bubble Mewღ, I sold some spare Disney Lorcana promos on eBay for $550, only to find out that, after various listing and promotional fees, eBay took a 30% cut, leaving me with just $379. That was the first and last time I’ll be selling anything on eBay. From there, it was on to Facebook, unfortunately.

It’s A Seller’s Market Out There

You’ll see some pretty unbelievable things in the Pokemon TCG Facebook groups. I thought I’d see lots of pictures of cards for sale, but mostly I saw pictures of piles of money. Hundred dollar bills fanned out across a bed, with captions like “Looking for PSA 10s, will pay 75%”. No one even cares what cards they buy. They’d probably prefer if every card just had a dollar value written on it ins✃tead of art.

I posted my Bubble Mew in a few groups, as well as Markꩵetplace, and for a few days I fielded a range of annoying offers. Many offers of trade for sealed product - evidently inexperienced sellers have overinvested in some recent sets that they’re now desperate to move - and extreme lowballs. Some obvious scams, some less obvious scams, and eventually, I found som💜eone making a reasonable offer, who lived nearby, and seemed legit.

I met the buyer on Tuesday at 1pm at a Target near my house. When I arrived he told me to meet him on the side of the building. There I found about 60 people lined up, waiting for the vendor inside to🐭 finish restocking the Pokemon cards for the week. I asked what was being restocked and no one knew. Whatever was there, they were going to buy it.

I drove home gripping eight crisp $100 bills, my mind racing with all the other cards I might be willing to sell. When I got home I looked at my own Van Gogh Pikachu, a PSA 10 I got from one of the Pokemon Center restocks, and I started to rationalize parting with it. When the current craze ends, will my cards even be worth anything? Wouldn’t it be better to cash out now when I need the funds than wait and risk them🦩 losing value? What is even going to be the point of having money in a few years when global warming kills all the crops and the water wars begin?

It’s a rotten culture, but it’s hard to blame any one person for wanting to trade a piece of shiny cardboard for a potentially life-changing amount of money. I can feel sಞelf-righteous about wanting to keep Pokemon pure, but at least I can understand the allure of making a sale now. I feel comfortable knowing that money is going towards important things like my wedding aꦺnd hospital bills, but if that wasn’t the case, I think I’d end up regretting what I did. That $800 could be gone, spent on who knows what, and I’ll never see my Bubble Mew, my first graded card, ever again. But I guess it wouldn’t bother me as much if I never actually cared about the cards in the first place.