This GREAT stamp tells a story about the incredible draw of collectibles. Pokemon has shown an amazing escalation, value wise, that is pretty unprecedented.
Offering the most encouragement is the fact it’s 20 years old and still going strong…stronger than ever before. It’s not a fly by nighter or one hit wonder.
I think I can safely say every member of efour is an overall success in regards to the investment side of the hobby. How many communities can say that, especially those that consist of young adults?
Where is Pokemon going from here? Having a little time under my belt I can safely say, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild ride;)
that will be my no rarity charizard in 100 yearbz… I shall be getting life extention technologicalz to see the moment where my zard destroys your 1st ed garinson.
It’s hard to say. I’m sure Pokemon will still be extremely popular in the next 20 years. But I can’t think of anything to relate it with.
Sports cards have actual players and real life history associated with them, so people can relate and have an interest simply by growing up playing and watching them, baseball etc. They will never go out of fashion.
Comic books such as batman and spiderman are fantastic as they are superheroes, the ideal of having special abilities will always fascinate a young child, plus motion pictures are non stop every year making 100s of millions of dollars.
Pokemon is a creature based card game that has expanded into almost everything it can make money out of. One of the best marketed products in the world. As long as they keep that up then I’m sure the early cards will do fine. It needed the so called 2nd Pokemon boom with Pokemon Go to jump start back into life, with this price boost craze. Before that the hobbie was still alive but with a fraction of the interest from the early days, card collecting that is.(I could go deeper but it’s a huge subject to talk about).
What my view is as long as Pokemon is relevant and keeps doing what it’s doing then it should be fine. I think eventually they will be a price point where people won’t be willing to pay a specific amount on say for instance wotc cards. Will children now really care or want to pay an extraordinary price for Pokemon history in 15-25 years time, who knows. We all know the value of graded scare cards as we grew up with them. But 3 years ago the prices were super low compared to today. A lot can change in a short and very long amount of time.
Not sure what else to say on this. So in Pokemon we trust.
The MMORPG VR Pokemon game will be the the next big price spike. I’d say there’s about 10 good years before something like can be made, though, due to current limitations. #nostradumbass
I don’t really know, as Pokémon is an odd bird as far as cards go. It’s a card game where playability isn’t always a factor in driving the price of a card and when it is it usually isn’t for long, although Extended may change that long term. Even YGO usually needs the cards to be good to be valuable I think, I’m not that familiar, whereas a Pokémon card can be popular just because of the Pokémon on it. Plus as joeseph88 said, there’s no telling whether or not kids now will be willing to pay good money for WotC era cards when they’re older (though I suspect that as long as the games are still a thing early printings of the original 151 should be a safe bet to at least stabilize somewhere half decent). Taking that into consideration I feel like in that regard comics are a good reference, long running characters with new ones added to the roster fairly regularly and the early appearances of popular ones are fairly stable with a few other significant ones along the way often matching them in desirability.
Plus imo Sun and Moon mixed things up, and there’s apparently a core series game coming to the switch. Seems to me they’re changing things up a bit. Actually I think they need to try more things with the TCG mechanics to mix things up there rather than the games.
As I’ve said before I’m primarily a MTG investor/seller, I started taking more notice of pokemon when a lot of MTG youtubers started incorporating pokemon content into their channels to diversify and continue their growth. I started looking at some pokemon youtube channels and saw Deriums exponential growth (they were a magic channel for 4-5 years that I watched and never broke 50k subs, their pokemon channel reached 50k in less than a month iirc). I see people like unlisted leaf with over a million subs and all he does is hype poor quality box openings split over multiple videos. I see Rudy from AI buying heavily into pokemon sealed product. The growth and popularity is undeniable and I followed the market and trends for almost a year before I was confident enough in the future potential to buy in (I’m really safe/conservative, I do a LOT of research).
I draw a lot of similarities between magic 5 years ago when vintage cards started growing exponentially to pokemon now where we’re starting to see that. I think this is just the beginning, I think 1st edition base set will soon be an unachievable goal for a lot of people, I think the growth will flow on to 1st edition jungle and fossil and probably the other 1st edition sets. I see 1st edition printings like mini MTG reserved lists, the product is limited, every box that gets opened reduces the pool forever and there aren’t enough boxes or mint raw cards to flood the PSA 10 grade.
I think pokemon is bigger than magic and I think the market will adjust over the next few years (it’s already started) and a lot of these currently cheap PSA 10s are going to be a lot more expensive in future. Pokemon has over 100 PSA 10 1st edition base charizard in the registry and the card i still selling for $20k … MTG has maybe 50 black bordered BGS 9.5 lotus and beta can be bought for around the same price at 9.5 … alpha is a lot more expensive currently but I think this shows the demand for vintage pokemon is real. If a card with 100+ PSA 10s can still sell regularly for 20k while MTGs comparable card has half the amount graded and sells for similar amounts for beta I think this is a strong indicator pokemon will continue growing. The 1st edition base card prices increase are going to pull other PSA 10 1st edition cards up along with them.
Lastly pokemon is something that will constantly have people buying in as they grow up. All these kids watching poke tubers opening 1st edition or vintage product, seeing people like Leonhart show off his 1st edition base charizard are going to dream of having them one day … and some of them will start that journey once they have the income to do it. I belive pokemon is going to keep growing at least for another generation.
My points are pretty brief I could go into it a lot more but the AFL grand final is on so I want to go watch that so this was a bit rushed, hopefully you guys get what I’m saying
It’s all about whether or not Pokemon can retain great popularity as a brand in the years to come.
If Pokemon retains anything close to its current level of popularity - which is enormous - I believe the price of older cards will most likely continue to rise. The reason Pokemon prices have climbed is because of the enduring popularity of the franchise. Collectors put their value in sports cards and old comic books because sports and super heroes continue to be popular. So if Pokemon fizzled out, those of us with valuable collections would all be screwed.
The good thing is that Pokemon doesn’t look to be going away anytime soon. Pokemon is the second best selling video game franchise of all-time (only behind Mario). Pokemon Sin and Moon just smashed records for sales. And this doesn’t even include the worldwide sensation of Pokemon Go.
Last year, a poll showed that while only 61% of Millenials under 30 recognized Joe Our honorable president (the Vice Present of the United States), 98% recognized Pikachu. And there’s a whole generation behind them that is now growing up with Pokemon.
The Pokemon franchise seems to be a juggernaut in every way and it’s so diversified as an entertainment company that it’s hard to see its fortunes falling too much anytime in the foreseeable future.
So with all that said… none of us know. Maybe 20 years from now Pokemon isn’t a big deal… but I’m not betting on that.
And if the franchise remains very popular, I think the cards that are now 20 years old will be even more valuable when they’re 40 years old.
There were so many indicators this past year, including some you mentioned, that it’s a bit of a shock so many people waited. Der, Rudy, and others got it but so many didn’t.
I actually think this could be expanded to almost the whole WotC line. The design of the game and the mechanics have fundamentally changed since that era to the point where very few of the cards could be reprinted with any impact, plus there isn’t a demand for playable cards, which incidentally brings me to the one little thing I have with the comparison to the Reserved List. The fact that people still play with those cards. Basically a non-graded Black Lotus will still fetch at least 4 figures as long as it is playable, a non-graded 1st Edition Base Charizard in the same condition will usually not. There’s a much bigger gap, and that’s because people still want to make use of (some of) their Reserved List cards thus driving demand for raw cards but letting demand for graded dwindle.
And yes that does mean people are out there shuffling up with the value of a new car sometimes.
I agree that there is such a crucial play element in MTG that creates different drivers of the market. So it’s difficult to translate the historical trends of the MTG market over into the pokemon market.
Regardless of what factors drive the market, the key takeaway is that pokemon is around 6 years behind MTG. . So you can’t look at a played black lotus fetching 4 figures and say that 1st ed base charizard isn’t at the same level since a played zard is attainable for less than $500. You can’t really compare them directly because there is a 6 year gap.
Again, I am not discounting the play element that drives demand for mtg, but I have no doubt in my mind that a 1st ed base charizard in played condition ungraded will be >$1000 in the next 5-6 years.
No can fully make sense of the different market drivers for each respective tcg, but I wouldn’t be surprised if when pokemon gets to its 25 year anniversary, it will be even more expensive than mtg cards are now. I believe the sheer number of millenials who are going to reenter the hobby over the next 5-10 years is going to surprise everyone, even those of us who are expecting it.
But Nintendo/TPC is doing a good job keeping it going. With a theatherical release of the new Pokémon Movie ‘I choose you’ dubbed in all languages with code-cards for the UltraSun/Moon video game and I’ve even read special TCG Promos. They targetting a whole new generation, with parents that all grew up with or during the early age of Pokémon.
So one thing is for sure, there is future in the hobby. If this means that cards like 1st Base Zard are going to be 250,000 $ cards in 2025 I doubt. Because I guess Nintendo will come up with a very iconic Pokemon very soon that the new generation can relate more to.
This reminds me of a story about a stamp I heard many years ago. It was a stamp also worth over 1 million USD and some guy had one of them in his possession. What he did? He bought the other copy, and ripped it in halve, so the copy he had raised in value. Now there’s only one existing copy left. Kinda a dick move imho…
I hope no one ever does this with rare Pokémon cards…
