I was just scrolling through eBay and noticed that past few sales on eBay are about $750 and before it was selling for $550. Just curious on the increase in price especially for a box that is worth sub 1000. All were US sellers.
IDK how much faith I would put into sold listings on eBay. I regularly see sales that seem suspiciously high or low.
Its literally caught fire. At most 2 months ago you could’ve had them for $400-$500 all day. From what I’ve seen from other people is that they believe there are way less sealed boxes out there then thought, not sure on the validity of that claim. I kick myself for not getting one when I could, but it is what it is.
That set was released before the pokemon go boom. When there wasn’t as many people in the hobby. And they didn’t reprints sets into the ground. All of the sets before the boom and reprint era are rising. phantom forces,xy base and furious fists. Its full of charizards,low print run, its before the boom, nice box art. It has a lot going for it imo.
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it was always going to pop in price at some point! Look at plasma storm and stormfront any set with a very good/rare chase charizard is going to be the first to increase in value. i won’t be surprised if burning shadows finds crazy increases years down the line although not to this extent due to the overall amount but the zard is holding its own value wise
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Agreed. I’m going to scoop 5-10 burning shadows box’s in a year or two. Its only a matter of time before that one pops.
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On the Charizard note: Has anybody seen unusually high inorganic activity around Unbroken Bonds (in any language)? Around its release, multiple people told me that they started buying Pokemon boxes as investments. The German boxes have already doubled in value and I’m wondering if this is just because of poor distribution and printing or also because of larger private positions. The rise in value for that set was unreal.
Similar thoughts on Hidden Fates - there’s almost as much sealed product on eBay as on release, but almost exclusively offered by private sellers.
I’ve definitely seen some activity on unbroken bonds boxes in the UK. Personally I just believe it’s going through a hype moment but who knows… I personally dont see why its increasing more so than burning shadows but moderns such a hard market to track.
As for hidden fates that set was a dream for flippers. Huge demand, huge hype and overall one of the best modern sets made. It was always going to increase in value in the short term so I’m not surprised that loads of people are cashing in.
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Ive noticed the same and the low pricing has me confused. The high pricing (presumably from shill bidding) makes sense as they are trying to increase the market value, but why would you list a high end item and end it early with a low price? Also noticed a ridiculous amount of brand new accounts selling high end singles.
@boorail85 I suspect the lower prices are caused by sellers ending their auctions early. For whatever reason they end up in sold and completed searches, which I guess works for eBay, but trying to track sales data is a pain.
Kinda crazy to me these sell for so much, I know a guy with quite a few cases of all the sets after the Ex era. Im sure he isn’t the only one hoarding cases either.
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XY sets printed before primal clash have a more limited supply because they were not subjected to reprints. In addition to touting a selection of secret/ultra rare charizards, Flashfire is one of the few XY sets that made it in before the cutoff of today’s insane production volume for modern sets. Which is why phantom forces is already a 200+ box while great sets like poor roaring skies/ancient origins is perpetually sitting at $80 despite having an awesome selection of full-arts IMO. (Gold secret rare shiny m-Rayquaza, primal groudon and kyogre for $100 in PSA 10 and thats still overpriced)
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All other comments are good.
One theory I have as a possible explanation is people watch the box prices and wait for price movements to see which sets are starting to move up in price. A quickly rising price could mean that supply is running out so the rising price stimulates more demand…causing the price to move up even higher. The wild card with sealed product investing has always been you never know how much of a position other investors have and when they’re going to unload it. For more modern sets we’ve obviously seen that to be a very big problem seeing as how many of these sets still sell for under $125/box enough though they are (in theory) out of print. So much inventory is being held in the product that people can sell it all day long for $100-125/box and it would still take them years to unload their position. Once the box goes above $300 it seems the only people left holding the product are more serious long-term investor types.
- 7 charizards (the zard set)
- very low print run
- pre pokemon Go (by 2 yrs)
- charizard box art
Not too surprising really.
I remember reading commentary at the time that the reason there were so many charizards was due to popularity of the TCG waning.
Whether it’s true or not, i don’t know.
Either way the booster box is, without a doubt, interesting from a collectors point of view.
To the best of my knowledge regarding modern, which isn’t too much, I believe the true value is the first ever “modern” FA Charizard card was printed here. It is heavily underrated and is an absolutely gorgeous card. I’ve been buying them up for awhile now since I saw this coming a few months back. Sorry for the 2 week bump, but I absolutely love this set and pairing the Charizard up with the FA Blastoise and Venusaur from X and Y base.
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My theory is that it has to do with shifting dynamics of the supply and seller goals. Every set has at least some consistent demand even roaring skies, primal clash and steam siege.
When the set is in print then retail stores have it in their inventory and stock up a certain amount. These sellers just want their 10-20% profit and quick movement of the inventory. For low-demand sets like roaring skies these retail sellers will get stuck with unsold inventory and they’ll just stick to the $90-$100 price point. They just want to sell the product so they can buy higher demand product. They have very little interest in long-term speculation. Overtime, these retail stores eventually sell all of their inventory so they drop out of the market as sellers for the specific set. Eventually all of the retail store sellers are completely gone from the market. Now the market shifts to sellers that are purely long-term speculators and these sellers have much different goals compared to the retail store sellers. They want 2x,3x,4x or more return on their investment and generally don’t put themselves in a position where they need to fire sale their long-term positions. I’ve noticed that the psychology of these speculators is almost a mirror image to a wine collector.
It doesn’t matter if you know someone who has 20 cases of flashfire because that person isn’t going to unload the position and collapse the price. All the speculators know that sealed product only goes in one direction once it is off the reprint list.
Then you have the whole dynamic with the boomerang nostalgia buyers that want to open up boxes from their childhood. Now you have a surge in demand and a limited supply held by the speculators. Price only goes one direction.
Sorry admins if this reply is a little late but I was wondering what peoples thoughts are on the price of booster boxes in relation to the price of buying the set cards raw or PSA graded? To me it feels like the individual cards have some catching up to do and there is some disparity between the prices.
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The more boxes Pokérev and others keep opening, the higher the individual prices will keep going up. You could get a PSA 8 1st edition shadowless Charizard for around 3-3.5K last year. Now these go for 5 to 6K while the PSA 9 just sold for 9K recently. It’s going higher and higher up due to more boxes being open
Absolutely, but I was referring to Flashfire specifically!