Tip of the iceberg

Market
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This is my first post - I’m a longtime lurker here, and an even longer term collector. I just wanted to give some perspective that I rarely see on E4. People here seem to underestimate how much product is still out there, undiscovered. I see threads in comments all the time, where people speculate in confident tones “what are the odds that there’s THAT many early WOTC-era cards still lying around waiting to be found? It can’t be that many.”

I’m a case study of this assumption being incorrect.

I’m one of those collectors who is buying and holding, and always have. Been collecting for more than 20+ years at this point. I’ve collected on and off, but I still have something like 10k+ (At least) worth of cards. And it’s accidental. For example, I have more than half of all ex-era ex’s, including some of the more valuable ones, and have dups of many of them. I have close to 800+ wotc era holos - from before e series alone. I have about 300+ e series holos as well. I have no idea how many black star non holo rates I have, but the number is close to 1k. I know that these numbers are small potatoes to many of the big collectors here - but there’s more. I have 10 pop promo packs sealed (pop 5 - the one with the gold stars). I have 15 sealed WOTC packs. I have sealed WOTC Japanese decks. Again, not super impressive. But…of my WOTC holos, about 300 are in NM - M condition (I’m a very harsh grader, mint means flawless, NM means maybe 1 almost unnoticeable imperfection). The rest are still in great, undamaged condition. I have a several shining and gold stars that are in similar condition. I also have a bunch of old Japanese tourie promos that are in amazing condition, and a bunch of other misc. cards of value.

Here’s what I’m getting at: nobody I know knows I collect Pokémon cards. This collection has been known to me and only me for literally decades. I know I’m not the only one with collections like this. Selling my cards is something that I’ve never considered, even though, for example, I have 6 WOTC charizards, and several other of my cards have ballooned in value - like my 1st edition T17 typhloshion, or my 1st edition new lugia that has 0 print lines and is genuinely flawless (examined w/a loupe and everything, I’m a very harsh grader of conditions). Grading my cards has never crossed my mind. I have an old friend who has several really high value WOTC 1st edition promos and he doesn’t even know how valuable they are - he hasn’t thought about them in more that 10 years.

Back to my original point. My collection is one example. I’ve bought 4 binders off of craigslist. Met weird dudes in bars and cafes, and bought their childhood binders for 2-300 bucks. I had to stop from shaking each time I looked at those binders for the first time. They were being sold by jocks and bro’s who didn’t know what they had. To give you an idea, when I was going through new binder for the first time, I stopped counting WOTC holos when I hit 90. All were in flawless condition - literally flawless, the guy had clearly never touched his cards, had sleeved them right away. For 240 USD I got more than 1k WOTC cards and 90+ flawless holos from that era. I’ve talked with friends and coworkers, and many of them say the same thing. “Oh yeah, I have a big binder somewhere, I never played with them as a kid. One day I’ll dig them out of the attic.”

The amount of cards hidden in attics, basements, garage sales, etc, is going to be a slow but steady drip for decades onto the market. People will dig up old cards during moves, or when their parents or relatives are cleaning house, or when they have kids and remember them. Of my old friends from school, all of them had fat binders loaded with cards. Every kid those days had them, even if they didn’t care about Pokémon. Those binders have been forgotten and stashed away. I’m sure some cards will disappear due to attrition - water damage, being thrown away, or forever languishing in a box.
But…
The amount of hidden cards is obscene, and just because they’re not on the market, doesn’t mean they’re not out there.

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I’ve been searching ebay daily for almost a decade now, the amount of quality untouched old school collections hitting the market right now is minuscule compared to even a few years ago. There’s still some out there, but when they hit the market, they don’t go for cheap.

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100% agree, I’ve noticed it as well. But, I think there’s a a bias towards people who a) want to sell their cards, and b) know that they can sell them for more than beer money. The “silent majority” of people who have ‘forgotten’ or ‘buried’ collections is much higher.

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I agree with this post 100%. I think E4 also underestimates how much old sealed product there is left to hit the market as well.

I know of at least one person with dozens of each WOTC, ex, DP, etc. boxes still in the case. Not a collector, just an old vendor who doesn’t need the money.

I’d be willing to bet there are still several people like the person I know. Not everyone I know with a big collection has as much as him, but most people I know with a million+ in sealed product isn’t vocal about what they have/how much they have of it, which creates the false idea that this stuff is in far less supply than one would think.

Old product isn’t common by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve seen some people say there are less than/only X amount of sealed boxes of some sets still in existence, which is just a plain silly thing to claim.

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Argument from exception.

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No disrespect, but what’s your point? Of course there are untapped collections. But it’s not about what’s out there undiscovered, it’s about what’s available at any given moment.

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I think you underestimate the demand.

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Demand has nothing to do with my point. There are plenty of people on here who legitimately believe that there is far less product still in existence than there really is. I’m sure if the person I mentioned wanted to sell all of their boxes the market would eat it up, but that’s not at all what I’m saying, nor what I think OP is saying.

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The OP’s post was an odd half-flex. Nothing more or less. I’d recommend following PSA pop reports and previous sales for factual evidence of availability.

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@danza21 Nah, not trying to flex, just trying to illustrate my point via anecdote. I know it’s an n=1, but that’s why I’m including the stories I’ve heard from coworkers and friends. Again, all anecdotes, but if every single one of those many dozens of people were lying to me…it’s highly unlikely. What I’m getting at, and this also gets at @smpratte s post too, is that the amount of product available is a small fraction of the product actually out there - which will eventually become available. And almost none of it will be graded.

In Econ terms, yes, demand is literally what people are demanding right now. But what’s available right now is the tip of the iceberg - as family passes away and people move, as younger cohorts’ families will do, the number of old cards coming onto the market will steadily increase. I’m not trying to make a strictly economical argument here - I just think that PSA pops only reflect…well, stuff that is PSA graded. I know many on here turn their noses up at PSA graded product; including myself.

The amount of raw WOTC cards still out there is astronomical, so when people are like “there can only be x[low number] of ungraded valuable WOTC product out there,” it seems to underestimate how many cards are still out there.

as far as I know, 90%+ of my school friends don’t even have Pokémon on their radar, it’s something from their childhood that’s hiding in a box in the attic. That kind of forgotten product will eventually come out via garage sales, being handed down to their kids, or will probably appear on the market some other way organically, years down the line. This is what I’m getting at.

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^this. I see people speculating, and saying “go with the PSA pop report”. There’s so much product that is purposefully ungraded, and an exponentially larger number of cards that have disappeared into memory, I.e, closets, basements, attics, etc. I made this post because this seems like a criminally under-acknowledged reality.

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A few people like this have surfaced - multiple cases of WOTC sets stored away. Like your contact, they have no desire to sell or discuss in depth. If anything, they’re looking for a better understanding of today’s market knowledge without making moves. Main point is plenty is out there, although the majority is not available.

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If theres still sealed cigarette packs from the 1910, 1920s and so on there will always be pokemon product available

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Availability is more important than supply.
The exact reason these cards are so expensive today is because so many of them are just in some forgotten attic or in collections that will never be sold. Cards that are unavailable indefinably almost might as well not exist at all if no one can ever buy them.

And keep in mind for ever story you hear of someone finding a gold mine of old cards, there is a 1000 more stories of people finding nothing, but why would anyone talk about those stories.

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I can see OPs viewpoint. I collected heavily as a teen during PokeMania. I went out of my way at the LGS to buy cards I didn’t pull from packs. I have an entire shadowless collection as the base set variants were known back then except maybe the UK/AUS print run. I remember 1st edition Charizard would fetch well over 100$ and I didn’t have the funds to pursue one.

I got back into collecting Pokemon in 2018 but I’ll admit before that I honestly had no clue how valuable shadowless cards were even if mine are only PSA 5/6 material. So I do believe that there’s tons of binder collections hidden out there, HOWEVER, only a small percentage of these collections will be in mint or even near mint condition.

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The only thing that’s driving these cards out of attics is attention, and increased attention comes from increased demand. If these cards are going to come out of all these attics from all over the world that would require a very large demand to create that sort of attention. In that scenario the hobby isn’t in a bad place at all.

In regards to the condition of most of the raw cards that are lying around in people’s binders out there - You are substituting your anecdotal experiences for the market as a whole. Your small anecdotal experience is essentially irrelevant, we have a much larger sample size. We see lots of cards hit the marketplace online every day, and the overwhelming majority of these cards are not in Mint / Gem Mint condition. 99.999% of the cards that were printed were handled by children who did not immediately put them into sleeves and then stored them away for good.

Somehow even with all these Gem Mint raw cards in attics across the world, we have had zero 1st edition Base Chanseys grade as a PSA 10 in the last 2 years and zero 1st edition Base Charizards grade as a PSA 10 in the last 1.5 years.

I’m not saying that raw mint WOTC cards don’t exist in the world anymore and that there aren’t some people who have held onto cases of WOTC product but I think you’re overestimating the amount of Mint / Gem Mint product that is ever going to actually become available compared to what the demand for it is and will be.

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I’d estimate that today 99% of Pokemon product is owned at a cost basis lower than those items are currently transacting at today.

I’d further estimate that today 90% of items could sell at half of what they are transacting at today and make a profit for their owner.

I’d go even further and say more than half of all items could be sold at 10% of what they are transacting at today and make a profit for their owner.

Source: 99% of cards I own are 5x over what I paid for them.

What does this mean? I don’t know.

Disclaimer: I meant pre BW or “vintage” stuff, more accurate the further back you go.

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Ultimately the existence of any horde doesn’t matter until the owner is ready to sell. Even then, I can assure you at the right price your 300+ wotc holos wouldn’t last even minutes on ebay.

I think most people are aware that we are talking about cards printed on the order of millions and that there is a lot out there. But I’m not sure how useful this knowledge is in practice? Knowing there is a bunch of inaccessible latent collections, how is that helpful to me? And given the amount of buyers does it even matter if that stuff surfaces? Your concern is people may find their old binders but perhaps ironically, that’s how a lot of people re-entered the hobby and became consumers again. I think I’m just unsure on the point of bringing this up? Even if the number of hidden cards out there is vastly beyond my expectation, what specific actions should I take with this additional knowledge?

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I wouldn’t worry too much about more old cards surfacing. If there’s anything that can bring these cards to light, it’s a crazy price spike like we saw in the last months. After all, even those who almost forgot about their cards don’t want to miss out on those Ben Franklins. And if they still didn’t remember their old cards now, they probably never will. And I agree with others that while finding near mint condition cards is still possible, finding gem mint condition cards becomes more and more unlikely.

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Not sure about that one because you might be underestimating just how many of the collectors currently in the hobby are relatively new collectors, but I get your point in general. And your first 2 statements are certainly true.

Of course, the same exact thing could have been / was said when prices rose in 2016. Then we saw prices flatten out / have a negligible retrace before price rose rapidly again starting in 2019 and exploding over the last half-year (like they did in 2016).

I think the other thing you need to keep in mind is that many people, have, in fact, already cashed out on gains over the years. Particularly the people who have needed the money.

I bought my Zard for $700 in 2009. I could have cashed out a few years later for around $3-5k, that would have been a nice profit. But I didn’t. After the 2016 growth I could have cashed out for $40k, but I didn’t. And now I could cash out for at least $85k, but I won’t.

And yet, there have in fact been a lot of Zards that have been sold during this time. So yes, people are cashing out.

My point is that not everyone is holding onto these items from many years ago… and those that are holding by and large can afford to do so.

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