Hey guys, felt like it would a fun discussion to talk about when did you guys start getting back into the hobby and what made you want to do it? For me it was around 2019/2020 I was always buying the games and had owned all the consoles and had hard core collected the cards in the 90s and early 2000s but my big moment was I was working at a gym and it was a toxic work environment and my boss was taking advantage of me and I seen something on YouTube for Pokémon and I decided to buy a few packs and was opening them at my desk at work and it became my coping method to help with stress and In mid 2020 I purchased a raw charizard base 2 for around 200 bucks and I self graded and got the 9 and that made me fall in love with the hobby. I have much rarer cards but that card was the one to start it all for me and is my favorite in my collection. What about you guys?
Pretty much started collecting at the beginning in 1999, and I’d buy at least one card per year until now but some years were heavier purchasing years than others. I think around 2011, I may not have bought anything.
The year was 2016. 99gamers.com was a used video game trading site that used “Coins” as currency. They expanded their marketplace to allow any item to be sold. A few months before the website was taken down, I nabbed a sealed long crimp fossil booster pack set. When I got them in my hand, the nostalgia slapped me so hard I could not stop. I purchased sealed vintage packs, boxes, decks, promos, and lots of WOTC holos. I have sold very little since then, but in hindsight it was the best monetary investment I have made in my life even though I have no desire to ever sell most of it 
My girlfriend showed me her old Pokémon GO lineup which had a sick Groudon in it. Which prompted me to go pull out my old cards. I was curious what they were going for on eBay and then I bought a base set Charizard and Pikachu. My girlfriend laughs at the monster she created now.
My dad was in the hospital on hospice, and my family were all shaken up. To try and distract them, I got my little brother to start talking about what he had been doing with his money since he started working. He showed me one of those little cube dioramas from etsy with the little paper cutouts. It was the scene from emerald as you climbed up to see rayquaza. I think the combination of grief and excitement made me want that feeling I had when I was a kid again, so i went to target and bought a few Battle Styles booster packs. From there, I found breakers on Twitch as this was right when covid was hitting and product could be found exactly nowhere. The rest was history, now both me and my brother collect again 
First thing that brought me back in the hobby was finding a job.
After finding a job and getting a car to go to my job, the first thing I bought was a binder, a set of sleeves and an ancient mew. Sealed*. All from amazon. It was May 2018.
After a little break in 2019 where I was collecting other things, I was dragged back in by a friend during the lockdown. And well… if I hadn’t already bought some cards back in 2018 I wouldn’t have jumped back in during that time. And I wouldn’t be collecting cards by now. Covid era has been wild.
*purists already know how this has gone, and will curse me for the rest of my life
back at the end of 2020, for my birthday, i decided to go get a pack to open for nostalgia and it sucked me back in.
not sure if that was a terrible or amazing time to get pulled back in. prices were high, but so was enthusiasm
I was recommended an Unlistedleaf video randomly in early 2019 and happened to click on it. He was opening some sort of mystery box like item. In it he opened up Skyridge and talked about how rare, expensive, and coveted the set was. (I remember how much I loved the booster pack design in particular). Naturally, I went to my binder to see if I had anything remotely similar to what was in the video. Despite his video(s) being the first I watched, I didnt really start my “return” until I found Maxmoefoe’s channel. I proceeded to binge his content throughout the summer. I credit Max’s videos for keeping me in the hobby at that point. Every day after my summer job I would watch his videos, eventually motivating me to buy cards around the time Hidden Fates came out. That was the first set that I went to look for at release.
In 2020 I stumbled onto more smaller and more obscure channels, namely Tcagaming, Smpratte, and the up and coming Pokerev (who is small no more). To this day, these 3 + Maxmoefoe are the main channels I watch, rarely missing a video.
I collected cards as a kid (mid 2000s-2010) and stopped collecting around the time HGSS sets were releasing.
tldr: I started watching tcg videos in early 2019, bought cards in the summer a bit before Hidden Fates released, and have kept up ever since.
I made the mistake of finding my old binder from when I was like 15 years old (I’m in my 30’s now), & then through selling each card individually & researching… I got back into it, unfortunately. 
The 25th Anniversary is what got me back in, and I kick myself pretty often when realizing how much amazing stuff I missed post-WotC
I found my childhood collection back in 2018 and decided at the time it would be good to sell some of it to help my wife and I get a good start on our marriage by replacing my car, which was on its last legs. Thankfully my mom was (and is now again) just as into Pokemon as I was back in the day, so my collection was in far better shape than most people’s childhood collection. I became captivated all over again and I’m so glad I held onto about half of what I had. I bought a few cards here and there to add to my collection and then got more serious about buying around the pandemic when I had a more stable income.
I was never really out of the hobby per se; but what pulled me back into heavily collecting was just having disposable income. So from my first summer job in 2011 to now, I’ve been pretty much all in. From then until 2016 I just worked on building and finishing all of my WOTC set binders.
Then around the early Pokémon GO era I started watching some youtubers (namely Unlisted Leaf and Leonhart at first, eventually MaxMoeFoe SMPratte and TCA as well), and I tried opening modern for the first time. I picked up two packs of Burning Shadows and pulled a Tapu Fini GX and a Salazzle GX Full Art and the pack opening bug bit me again hard and suddenly I wanted to do modern set binders and everything in between.
I started around the Ruby/Sapphire era. Before then, I knew that the cards existed since my friend would show off his Neo cards and some of his base set. But I was more into Yu Gi Oh cards since I understood how to play that better than Pokemon. Ruby/Sapphire came out and I wanted the cards that had the pokemon that I actually used in game.
I fell out some time after Platinum, can’t really remember when. But I knew some of what was happening since my younger brother occasionally picked up a pack or 2. But after he stopped, I knew absolutely nothing about the cards until Covid. Got a new job working graveyard with people all my age. They had gotten back into Pokemon, and the McDonalds cards were big. We had a McDonalds by our workplace, so we’d go at midnight during lunch and get so many happy meals. Was fun. Bought some Korean booster boxes since they were cheap and available and ripped with my coworkers. Then from there I finally figured out what exactly I wanted to collect, since partial sets bothered me, and I wasn’t motivated enough to complete full sets.
Pokemon GO got me interested in Pokemon again. Like everyone, I was so deep into that game during the summer of 2016 and into that winter. The nostalgia had such a crazy grip and I was would be out from 10 am to 10 pm hanging out with complete strangers. Once the hype died down and the game didn’t feel like it was adding much content, I stopped playing.
In 2017 I found some Instagram pages showing off vintage Pokemon collections and doing raffles, which caught my interest. So I decided to find my old collection and see what was available for sale locally. I bought a handful of collections and started flipping some to buy more. I didn’t care for the majority of the cards I was flipping and transitioned to buying mostly WOTC and the chase cards from when I was young, which were mostly Lv. X cards. Back then claim sales were HUGE and you could actually get great deals.
Sometime during that time, I found Smpratte, GemMintPokemon and TCA on youtube and that exposed me to a lot of things I didn’t know existed. My scope at the time was more or less what I saw in my Instagram feed. PSA return videos and TCA’s video showing off his sealed collection were big influences for what I would later start to collect. There was also a video by Smpratte showing off a copy of Grand Party and that got me interested in non-English cards.
Mid 2018 or so, i picked up some shining legends marshadow boxes for $5 from gamestop. Always enjoyed the cards and still had my collections so figured why not. First pack was mewtube which looks awesome and i started to dive in. Bought a few craigslist collections from the area, learned a lot over a year, started to narrow down my main collection into something I had always enjoyed which was decks, and went all out to try getting them all. Everytime i thought i was close id find out about variant boxes. Now im really close and just cant source the remaining boxes but always keeping an eye out for them.
Evolutions in late 2016. A friend of mine played casually and talked me into buying a few boosters at like 11 pm. All the childhood feels came rushing back. Played the tcg until late 2017 and went head first into collecting.
Tag-team GX alt arts specifically Tag Bolt in 2018 but also GX Ultra Shiny was important for me.
I was YouTube algorithm’d to an Unlistedleaf video of a Dream League box opening in August 2019 where he pulled the Pikachu CHR. Not having seen Pokémon cards since early DP era, the simple concept of a whole card canvas and creature-character interaction was mind-blowingly magical to me. I never thought Pokemon had come this far with tcg illustrations and had to swing down the rabbit hole - and I’m still in it
It’s all @stagecoach’s fault!
Honourable mention to Yuka Morii’s gorgeous Venusaur & Snivy TAG-TEAM GX Special Art;
I don’t remember how, but I stumbled upon PTCGO around the Crimson Invasion release and got sucked into playing the card game. Then, from late 2020 to mid 2021 (around COVID time), I became interested in flipping cards. After I stopped (mostly because it was taking up more time than I liked), I was still consuming Pokemon content, and around late 2022, I figured I should finally spend the $300 in Visa prepaid cards I had been keeping since probably 2017 and took the dive into collecting. And here I am!