Listen, as I have posted numerous times previously, nothing elude the economic patterns that have been tried and tested for millenniums. Supply and demand dictate macroeconomics. You can rationalize why there are increases or decreases in demand. Heck, you can even prophesying future trends. But when the torrential landslide occurs, regardless where you live in that geographical zone, you will be somewhat affected if not directly due to bad air, potential disease, surging prices, long lines, closure of everything everywhere and who knows what else. When everyone and their dogs like Pikachu and when Pikachu always says Pika Pika then the franchise proceed to sell as much products as possible within a given range for whatever reason, you know a correction might be coming. I have some bad news for you if you are one of those people who is holding all those modern Pokemon cards and the sealed stuff and/or if you are one of those people who believe certain foreign language Pokemon cards will explode in value without understanding how the world works from a top ten-er standpoint, you are probably going to lose a lot of money. As I have said before and with the greatest respect for these fools, the Wall Street people in this game don’t care about cards nor educating the card loving people about the business world and are mostly in it to for pump and dump for the card people to hold the worthless falling knife bag.
The cards people are mostly semi-educated and definitely don’t know finance, accounting nor economics. When you combine these people together…..actually, you can’t, but hypothetically speaking if you could, it’s an even bigger disaster waiting to happen. Frankly this is not even about buying at retail or not and this is not even about price gauging or scalpers. This is about everyone and their dogs got boxes of potentially future junk wax that they thought it would be worth a fortune not realizing why the vintage people made a fortune in the first place. The truth is back then only a very small number of people actually cares about or even collected Pokemon cards and many of these people were kids. Pokemon cards were considered child’s play and toys that was literally sold at the toy section. Also, many people and their parents treated their Pokemon cards like trash like putting the cards in bicycle spokes or dumping them into the dumpster and actually played with the cards. In the early days of Pokemon, some religious organizations went as far as calling Pokemon satanic, propagated occult culture or was the instrument of the devil. Then there were the comparison of Pokemon battles with “dog fighting.” For all these reasons and possibly more, the retention rate of Pokemon cards was not all that high and many of the base set 2 boxes and packs did not sell all that well due to mass production, perception issues and many of the issues mentioned above.
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Hedging strategies for upside and downside risk protection in the Pokemon and sports cards markets.
No one in their right mind in the late 1990s locked these things up in vaults or put these behind the customer service counters at big box retailers. These cards were massively produced in the late 1990s but it’s only a very small fraction of the around 10 billion Pokemon cards are being printed per annum. The WOTC Pokemon cards, in comparison to the current annual print volume, is extremely scarce, many people are too hyped up over the modern stuff to realize that. Unfortunately for them, when they do understand this, it will be too late for them to acquire these as most of the available cards are in the hands of the people who value them who silently started stealthily hoarding these in large numbers when everything was all about modern. These people are a very very very very small segment of the collecting world who control all the cards, yes it’s a pun. Many of these people were either the original dealers who sold these vintage cards when they were first released in the late 1990s and are now just holding on to old inventory or the people who got into the hobby as a kid and had boxes upon boxes of these and started buying when Pokemon market was extremely depressed for all those years when the 10,000 dollar vintage cards were only worth a few dollars. Then there are the big boys investors some of them transitioned from coins and banknotes and others were investors of other things who sensed an opportunity in the sports cards then later went into the TCG card markets in within the last two decades.
This coming correction may be very brutal for many who treated this as a mainstream investment when the market is not mature enough to handle mainstream investment responsibilities. The biggest issue now is the regular people’s kids who can’t afford cable or Netflix won’t be able to be part of the new generation of Pokemon. I don’t think this very cause short term issues as most of the people who buy Pokemon cards are the big kids who passed their puberty years ago and most of these people don’t even watch the anime anyway and couldn’t tell you whether an artwork has eye appeal or not. I think this move won’t cause short-term issue nor medium-term issues for the Pokemon card market per se, however, it will cause a long-term issue where the market may price in slowing growth in potential fan base. I digress. I think the immediate downward pricing pressure is from the “everybody and their dogs” affect. Too many places are selling Pokemon cards giving vibes of the junk wax era and the unregulated double gambling element of getting a big hit and getting a high grade. The myth now is “sealed almost appreciate over time.” Which like a ticking clock where the dial points to the same 12 numbers at least twice a day, if you don’t care about inflation, purchasing power, time value of money or how many centuries it might take for that statement to be true, then yes, they are right. If you are rational though, you might need a new strategy. If I was holding many sealed and I know even the dealers might be selling them at discounts, I might take some calculated risks here depending on whether you bought a case or not.
Right now, there are zero ethical and labeling mandates for x-raying card boxes or cases. Yes there maybe potential ethical and legal concerns about resealed products or even calling loose packs that were “searched” as “unsearched” if it was actually searched. But x-raying card boxes and card box cases seem to be completely legal without the ethical questions per the above in the United States. The surprising thing is these x-raying services are actually quite cheap. I personally think one could get an accurate grading score estimate of a card by using free AI grading tools/services but for some reason certain popular grading service still get tons of grading volume a sign that shows there are severe disconnects between the card collecting community and reality…..There is a low probability that these free card grading AI tools/services could even help you anticipate the potential grade of the potential grail card(s) in the sealed box/case to maximize potentials. Instead of keeping everything sealed and risk a bigger correction later, one could possibly use x-ray services to understand what’s actually in the sealed boxes/cases and open up the boxes and cases that contains the grails and sell the sealed boxes and cases that don’t contain the good super stuff. This practice though seems quite unethical and probably should be somewhat illegal or regulated but since it’s probably not right now, one could decide to do this to avoid a bigger loss now and ensure this advantage can be utilized before this behavior becomes either unethical, illegal, regulated or all of the above.
The reality is most of the value and speculation in these sealed are the hope of finding a the perfectly conditioned grail card in the set. At the current moment, no one ask if a box/case has been scanned or not therefore not disclosing this fact likely is not considered even unethical at this point because there is no such wide recognition of such behavior being unethical. Obviously there may be radiation from x-raying but the potential safety concerned of x-raying sealed boxes/cases seems to be already adequately addressed online. Please do not jump from one hell hole into another. When everyone is selling and buying vintage, it might not be the best time to buy vintage right now due to higher prices. In time of crisis, protect your wealth and everything else you care about first then worry about the rest. Stop the hemorrhaging first before you start your next move, that will give you the best chance for survival when you are no expert in survival. Dubbing your hands everywhere for a novice is likely going to make your situation ever worse. I also think the correction of the modern Pokemon set prices may also negative affect the prices of the vintages if this correction deepens into a potential crash or mini-crash. When a crash or a severe economic slowdown occurs or in the process of occurring in an economy, the central banks/governments usually take prompt and swift actions to save the economy (frequently these are coordinated actions taken by the entire world’s central authorities even between nemesis or enemies because everyone are negatively affected when the economy is suffering in any major market). Should someone or some/certain organizations/entities do something about this? I don’t really care as I am deeply diversified and cards collecting/investing at its core is basically just a hobby for me. I think even for those with large holding of vintages, selling now may be a good hedge against future demand induced liquidity sequences in the market where all cards will be hard to sell and it may be a race to the bottom. If it was me, I would probably sell most of my non-personal collection cards now at its high point within the current given potential near peak levels and retain the vintage cards that are of lower value at the moment. I anticipate a further slide in prices soon. I don’t think this is the best time to buy Pokemon cards right now even for vintages. As for sports card, there almost seem to be a reciprocal pricing relationship between Pokemon cards (and other TCGs) and sports cards. Even though they are two similar asset classes, if you ever been to a cards show, you will notice the dynamic right away in that many large predominately sports cards shows have few Pokemon vendors and predominate Pokemon card shows have even smaller sports cards vendors. Basically while everyone is still hot on Pokemon, certain sports cards may be severely undervalued.
As many modern Pokemon cards have declined in value, the hot sports cards market is not evenly spread out in terms of heat distribution. The blue chip legends’ cards are doing well but the non-Ohtani superstars and young future superstars’ cards are not doing all that well. Granted since I last discussed some of the undervalued relatively recent issued rookie cards that are worth buying, many of these young stars have either made to their first all-star games or are statistically all-star worthy and their rookie cards have 1 to 2X’d. I think many of these young superstar rookies with their rookie cards in 2025 are no brainer investments at a dollar or two per card. On the other hand, I am not so sure if a base Ohtani rookie is intrinsically really worth over 100 dollars per card. The real issue is, just like in the Western and especially American society, for reasons I won’t elaborate, after all the hype and potentially institutionalized hype dissipate when Ohtani past his career prime or retires, any number of things that people may link with Ohtani’s legacy will likely revert his card value to the mean of all the other players who experienced this kind of hype but ultimately we’re measures by how many steps down they are from the legacy of Babe Ruth and the other greats in the eyes of the large demographic of people in this hobby that actually determine the supply and demand and ultimately the baseline price they are willing to pay for the rookie cards of a certain player.