Based on estimates, WOTC probably printed around 13 billion official Pokemon cards in English, maybe another 2 billion in whatever other languages Pokemon cards and another 5 billion in Japanese cards from the same era by a company that I shall not name during the same period. 20 billion official Pokemon cards printed during the vintage era of eight years or so seemed a lot. It actually kind of rivals the junk wax era. The truth is much less stark than that in terms of current supplies. Pokemon was mostly collected by kids back in the day unlike sports cards and other collectibles. The attrition rate of these early Pokemon official cards were massive with some estimate to be around 90% of the total bulk/common and 30% of the holo from the official Pokemon card sets from that era were destroyed, missing or in extremely poor conditions. Since Pokemon is a respectable franchise, no one is probably making any more of these cards from that period. The supply of these cards are also shrinking due to poor storage, lack of incentives to take care of them due to lower value and for whatever other reasons. In essence, there are probably a few hundred million to a billion or two that are effective circulatable at this point.
The longer the prices depresses for these older cards, the longer these cards will continue to shrink in circulatable size. Based on simple estimates of attribution rate based on current trajectory, I think by 2040 most likely these WOTC era official Pokemon cards’ circulatable size will be in the mid to low hundreds of millions range. For context, during the junk wax era, cards companies probably produced billions of sports cards a year. Pokemon is so massive that it is truly its own category in terms of card collecting and guess how many independent companies not collaborating with Pokemon can print official Pokemon cards? For comparisons, Topps alone printed probably tens of billions possibly hundreds of billions of baseball cards in its history, there are probably at least a few billion vintage Topps baseball cards that are circulatable even now and if you count the junk wax era, probably in the tens of billions.
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Why buying bulk WOTC era Pokemon cards super cheap is a good idea.
Topps was only one of the many companies printing licensed MLB cards back in those days. Many of those cards were taken care of much better, even the parents who wanted to throw away their kids’ cards probably thought twice because many of them knew sports cards can be worth some money. Not many parents probably felt the same way about Pokemon cards during the vintage era. When you think about it, the junk wax period in sports card likely ended before the first official Pokemon cards were ever printed therefore if you just go by calendar years, you could possibly say the junk wax era cards were vintage cards as at least 25 years have gone by since they been printed. The bottomline is, the market has not priced in the supply scarcity of these WOTC lower-end cards yet and especially when grading costs may be so probability high that it may not even be worth it to grade some of these lower-end cards. However, when the supply of these become critical low enough that everyone start talking about it, if the grading mechanism is still strong at that point or something else takes its place, these cards will likely significantly increase in value much like Jordan cards or 1990s basketball insert cards. At a few cents per common at bulk pricing and most of them seem to actually be in decent condition, it’s literally a numbers and calendars game at this point.
I think a good reference point for these bulk/common cards would be equivalent to late 1950s and 1960s common cards in decent to good conditions. Many of these cards regularly sell online for a few dollars. Back in those time, these common cards were probably worthless considering a whole cello pack that contained around 12 cards and a bubble gum was probably retailing for 10 cents. 10 cents is worth over a dollar in 2026 and if invested into S&P 500 is about 90 dollars. When you think about it, there likely some expensive cards in each set in Topps during those years and even if a card from the cello pack in near mint condition will likely sell for 100 dollars plus a card with some going for more, keeping the cards, never mind a mint cello pack which probably is worth a few thousand dollars today, probably will be a better investment than investing into S&P 500 even discounting the liquidity risk. When you think about it, aren’t vintage Pokemon cards also trending in that direction with how much the sealed packs and boxes are worth and how much premium those holos in mint conditions get?
The only difference is the WOTC official Pokemon common/bulk Pokemon cards haven’t caught up in prices of those vintage 1950s and 1960s Topps baseball cards yet. A lot of places have boxes of these bulk vintage cards for around a dollar for one or two. If you are able to get bulk deals to cut that cost to a few cents per card even if you can’t pick which cards you get from the vintage WOTC official Pokemon cards bulk collection, it still likely will be an excellent deal in the future considering how much people now care about benchmarking based on “comparables” and almost every negotiation in cards is arbitrary about why something is or is not kind of like card grading in some ways, though that issue might be resolved in the future due to standardization of criteria though AI grading like how calibration and precision manufacturing where tolerance specifications are set and deviation from such specifications are strictly limited to extreme small margins.