I’m curious to know what others think about the inclusion of Mainland China in Pokémon. This means Pokémon is now available to 1.4 billion people, which is more than 4x the population of the U.S. and 11x the population of Japan, which have the biggest market share respectively.
Having this in mind, where do you see the Chinese market heading? Do you think the next boom will take place in the Chinese market? Do you plan on making any plays in the Chinese market?
A lot of U.S. sellers have been shipping to Mainland China over the past year. I don’t see that slowing down anytime soon.
It’s interesting that they are a whole era+ behind Japanese and U.S. releases, so they haven’t yet reached SW/SH. I can imagine that the hype will be heightened when they reach the Simplified Chinese version of Eevee Heroes/Evolving Skies.
I think wealthy Chinese buyers will continue to scoop up high-end Japanese cards, including trophies and exclusive promos.
No. I think Japan’s current boom is partially related to the influx of Chinese buyers.
No.
Yeah from what I’ve been told by some people in the know over in Japan, is that the huge boom in certain Japanese cards has basically been a combination of Chinese interest and specific Collectors/companies in Japan intentionally inflating the market with things like lotteries. Not the poke center lotteries but these ones they’ve been running that started attaching these artificial values to cards starting with that one Lillie card that blew everything up.
So I don’t really see anything major changing from this point on regarding their influence.
They’ve already reached rotation D (SWSH year 1) in May:
It’s just that we’ve been talking about their ongoing stuff less due to less interest than Japanese cards and the difficulty of obtaining them outside China.
One thing for sure though is that they won’t release EH as-is like Southeast Asia as they are very likely to stick to collective set releases in rotation E based on how they released the first SWSH sets. It’s gonna be interesting to see how they plan to release the Eeveelutions, whether that’s gonna be regular sets, gift boxes or in the worst case tournaments.
Reminds me of a Japanese slang “VC” or “VietChi” （ベトチャイ） , which is an offensive word commonly used to describe Chinese and/or Vietnamese crime groups in the past but now used to describe Chinese and/or Vietnamese scalper groups who organizes people to line up and scoop large amount of TCG boxes from stores in Japan during releases.
So far from what I’ve seen the Chinese buyers seem to have affected the Japanese language cards more than any other language. Echoing what has already been said in this thread
Strange, mainland Chinese should like English too, from how they are fans of western brands like iphones.
No, Chinese won’t like everything Western just because the things come from the west (in some cases they can turn anti-Western really quick due to reasons such as political issues).
In fact, for media such as anime and games their preferences are much closer to Japan (you’ll be very surprised to see how many Waifu gacha games these days are actually made by Chinese companies), which also applies to Pokémon TCG, as I brought up earlier about how the most expensive set Supporter (Hat Lillie) is trending at 5x the price of the most expensive set Pokémon (Shiny Charizard GX):
Since I collect Simplified and Tradition Chinese cards, I search every day in the chinese marketplace.
Overall, the Japanese cards perform slightly better in China, but nothing out of the ordinary.
There the auctions are simple and safe. Fees are very low. Shill bidding almost doesn’t exist ( you need to deposit some money first before bidding , if you do not pay, you will lose it).
These are auction ended today by Pokecolor.
I made some calc of them.
Are you sure?
Like I said, liking iphones and Jessie J doesn’t mean they have to like English Pokémon.
Plus, this was what happened after the “lining up for iphones” you mentioned:
They’ve also been lining up for Lillies:
Liking these things doesn’t necessarily mean you like western things - just that you happen to like something that’s western.
If Chinese buyers are going to be buying translated cards anyway, they can buy Chinese versions - I see little reason for them to buy English versions (other than having to wait). On the other hand, Japanese cards are the originals and have better print quality/texture, so no surprise Chinese buyers are opting for those.
Looks like some people are shocked that the Chinese market prefer Japanese cards over English. Like what @cdarwin7 mentioned, Japanese cards are lower in supply, have better print and texture, better exclusive promos and they are the originals.
I mean, Chinese cards have Japanese texture, so there’s no reason at all to collect English unless they like English texture or there are exclusive cards.
Are they using japanese printers to print chinese cards? I have been making plays in chinese cards past several months and the print control quality is amazing like japanese.
I wonder if the pcompany prints less japanese because they have to print both chinese and japanese(if my assumption is correct)
Japan prints Thai, Indonesian and Chinese.
Wow, printers go brrrr
Yup, already first noticed the difference when I got both Eng and JPN versions of Espeon Vmax alt art cards.
But it was the stark difference of black gold Mew Vmax ENG and JPN versions that turned me into a full time JPN collector since its Eng version came out in Lost Origin.
Currently still have a collection of graded vintage cards in ENG, was wondering whether it’s worthwhile to convert all to JPN…
From what I understand, Chinese cards are made in Japanese factories. QC should be the same. If Japanese are having a hard time keeping up with inventory, that explains why there’s less Chinese booster boxes available for sale compared to the amount of Japanese resellers.
In my opinion, I think now is the best time to at least keep an eye out on Chinese booster boxes because they’re playing catch up REALLY fast as they started with S&M era and they’re already in SWSH. Now is probably the best time to pick up some Chinese S&M boxes because they will be more valuable compared to their Thai and Indonesian counterparts.
No wonder the edges rough and printlines are more frequent. Printer overworked.
Waiting for CHN Moonbreon to be released… Can’t wait.
