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If you've been living under a rock Pokemon for years, you might not have heard that people like to buy up and resell rare Pokemon cards.
It's a problem seen regularly for the best card games, and it's also something the tech industry has trouble with thanks to people reselling the best graphics cards, but of course the Pokemon Trading Card Game is no stranger to the phenomenon known as "scalping" (man, I hate this word). These are a special brand of resellers, though, with some of the more rare cards reaching prices far and beyond the cost of your average TCG card pack. You could build a literal house of cards with the price these things go for. Nay, a mansion of cards.
Speaking to the BBC, Pokemon Company CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara goes into why Pokemon Trading Card Game reselling is such a big issue for the company ahead of the Pokemon Presents February 2025 live show.
"When the second hand market becomes more valuable because of rarity, that is problematic because our business is affected," he said. In response to many fans' suggestions to just print more cards, Ishihara makes it clear that "Those items are seen to be valuable because they're rare or seen as vintage – and it's not our place to say that they're not."
But with the second hand market being in the state that it is, Ishihara says it "prevents new products from being sold".
As just one example of the Pokemon TCG aftermarket's bloated prices, Logan Paul paid the equivalent of $5.3 million for a pristine Grade 10 Pikachu Illustrator card (including the price of a traded Grade 9 Pikachu Illustrator card), breaking the Guinness World Record for the most expensive Pokemon trading card sold at a private sale in 2021. Bonus round: The wrestler and influencer was presented with the Guinness World Record the second he went backstage after his triumphant WWE WrestleMania debut, which he'd walked into wearing the card around his neck.
With Pokemon TCG cards reportedly being used to commit money laundering crimes, it's a wild world of economic encounters out there for Pokemon trading card enjoyers. Still, that won't stop people spending hundreds of hours learning to develop a website to create 23,000 card databases for the game. Nor will it stop people from spending millions of dollars on rare cards and then selling them on.
And it certainly won't stop people from selling fake first-gen Pokemon cards to blockchain entrepreneurs. It's the same with any rare item market, the gullible few will continue to pay over-the odds and ruin it for the rest of us.
If you're wondering about more Pokemon TCG mishaps, why not learn about the dwindling $3,000 price of streamer Ludwig's originally $40,000 collection. Or maybe nab some normal or even better priced Pokemon deals below:
