The Question of the Day is a way to facilitate community discussion to help members ponder the unanswered questions of the world that are somehow relating to the hobby. Questions are many times open ended and up to interpretation. Feel free to post your thoughts in as much or as little detail as you’d like.
Helpful Considerations may or may not help some people focus their answer, these are blurred to not bother those who have their own ideas.
Today’s Question: QotD: Arceus descends from the heavens and grants you $100m USD, tax-free. What Pokemon-related endeavours or projects would you spend it on? (this was a suggested question)
Helpful Considerations: Card collection in 100% Gem Mint? Recreating the Game Corner in your town? Buying a Pokemon wrapped plane (and flying lessons for it if you need)?
I would spend 1 million on exhibits and getting connections lined up for a traveling museum and exhibition. Then I would spend 52 weeks travelling to small towns across the United states where I would be for 1 week per town and I would spend 500k per show. If anything is left of the 500k after I take care of the essentials to run an absolute festival of a show, then it will go directly into the town we are at and attendees by giving away product equally to all that attend. No need to be stingy with paying fair rates but I would also have commemorative items made for the local towns that host. After Ive spent 27 million on this endeavor, it will then be time to take this show around the world. Every country I can make it to, every way I can, I will spend 4 years going across the world still spending at least 350k in every country in the world if possible, same deal about anything extra left over. And when all that wraps up, with the just under 5 million that is left, I will probably start a gallery for my crafts that will feature Pokemon related things from the community that I will spend the money on procuring from artists and people who are interested to sell to others but also using it as a partial museum to showcase what Ive gained from the last 5 years. I have no idea if any of that is feasible but it would be a wild time for sure.
If Arceus gave me $100M USD to invest in Pokémon, I’d buy a v600 Epson Scanner and a lot of random Pokémon cards in different languages in order to preserve them and build a decent database for Species Collectors that includes Variants & Languages, Distribution methods and Release dates …
Hire artists and animators to produce some Pokemon shorts akin to Pokemon Generations. I really want to see some slice of life content in the Pokemon world.
I’d buy the unicorn boxes that are almost for sale. The mint condition boxes with golden provenance, stashed away in better days by some of the older, better people in the hahbee. The boxes they would only let go of at 2-3x market rate. Maybe some uncut sheets too.
Other than that, I don’t know…maybe become a despicable fuck on instagram?
I would probably buy all squirtles in all languages then I would go around spreading the wealth to the nicest stores that struggle to keep up or just straight up buy it out and give low prices to casual players struggling to get modern product, then I would get a couple trophy cards that have been always out of my price range, put together a full museum or some of the rarest cards, snap cards, academy cards, some of the rarest errors, ext… then start a charity for kids who don’t have the chance to get anything past penny bulk letting kids open an etb each as I believe that no kid should have to look at that one rich kid on the playground who has hundreds in collection value at the age of 10 because their parents buy them everything without having at least something even if it’s just a single etb
Well, I would have fun visiting the Pokemon Centers there and buying whatever I want. So to answer your questions (and avoid infringing myself), the answer is yes.
One thing that I don’t like about collecting things is that it can be hard to share a collection with other people. So I’d also go the museum route. Since I’m too casual to do that properly I’d need to lean heavily on other people for recommendations on what exactly that would look like, but giving people the chance to experience all the different historical Pokémon things (play a round of the TCG with decks of different eras, have the video games playable somehow, etc) would be essential.
With 100mil I would knock on Xiao’s door. I would bust into Pkonno’s basement. If I’m
feeling whimsical I would buy all the “Steve Aoki Collection” and “Logan Paul Box Break” cards and livestream a bonfire.
In all likelihood I’d probably just pick an overlooked mid-era card with low PSA10 pop and slowly buy every copy over time. I wouldn’t tell anyone, either. No one would ever find out why this one random card never shows up at auction in a 10.
