I have a question for the crossover collectors here, which mostly came from a daydream I had the other day. In Magic, the value of many of the most valuable cards in the game is almost entirely based on their playability, and to an extent their past playability. Obviously rarity is still a powerful factor, but at the end of the day formats like Vintage decide prices nearly as much, if not more, than scarcity and demand.
What wouldPokémon****be like, ifPokémon****card value was derived from playability?
The scene: You’ve arrived at a local card store, filled with bustling players (post-COVID of course) and the owner says he has some very expensive cards that he just got in. A few more friends gather around, as he pulls out a PSA case.
Some gasps. “Nice card,” you say.
“Heh. That’s the warm up,” the old owner says, pulling out a second case.
*Insane. You expect nothing less from the guy who beat you the other day with a deck pimped out with 1st Edition Base Professor Oaks and 1st Edition Energy cards. Who even shuffles up cards that expensive, even doubled sleeved? You were lucky just to pick up the damaged Base Set 2 set of Oaks you have from a friend for cheap, and they still cost you an arm and a leg. You’ve still only got 2 Japanese Super Energy Removal- you’re looking for another 2 damaged copies in any language, but the old trainers are so hard to find. Not like you’re going to get your hopes up- The Pokemon Company made the Safari Zone Preserved List for a reason- those cards will never be reprinted, and no cards better than them will ever be printed in the future. Prices seem to just keep climbing.
“Saved the best for last,” he says, and everyone knows what’s coming. A few more onlookers have joined, knowing exactly what’s next.
He practically slaps the slab down on the table.*
*A wolf whistle and a scattered round of applause.
“That’s like a down payment on a house, man.” You hope one day you’ll be able to own cards that nice…*Any thoughts? What cards would be the most sought after in this sort of an alternate timeline?
All the most valuable base set cards would be most of the trainers and double colorless energy. Rocket’s sneak attack would be the most valuable card in the Rocket set and The Rocket’s Trap would be the most valuable card from Gym Heroes. Ditto and Magmar would be the best cards from Fossil. Neo Discovery and Neo Revelation would be considered worthless sets since all those cards sucks more or less. Neo genesis would be the best set overall together with base set.
@scarecrowman88 kind of hit the nail on the head. I still play Magic and love the game and used to play both Pokemon and Yugioh (though both have dramatically changed).
Base set would immediately be counted as a joke and would be one of the worst sets from the WOTC era - with modern cards being astronomically better. Even if you had a format like EDH (a MTG format where you have to create a 100 card deck using a commander and have no repeat cards), WOTC cards for the most part wouldn’t see much playability.
Funny thought - the Pokemon Illustrator would be expensive ish because it’s “exclusive” but more people would be willing to pay a ton more for something like Reshiram & Charizard Tag Team since the flavor text of the former is virtually useless in any deck.
Even the trainers, which you can use multiple times a turn? Super Energy Removal and Professor Oak, Item Finder…Computer Search is just a bad Demonic Tutor!
@pkmnflyingmaster, despite the playability of Black Lotus, the Alpha one on PWCC was still in a PSA case! But maybe BGS would have been better
@andrewvt36, is Computer Search still that good? I would have assumed Pokemon made something better at this point or a similar card but with more bells and whistles. I’ll be honest. I haven’t kept up with it since Neo Discovery so my assumptions are outdated and only based on what I’ve heard the last year or two from friends who play. XD
The Chansey erasure in this thread… As an actually hard to grade card with a more limited distribution than any trainer, similar to Slowing. I would not include Sneasel because it was banned while still in print so more copies would’ve been preserved vs played with. On the opposite side I would include Wigglytuff Base 2 which was highly played with and is the lowest pop psa 10 of base 2 with only pop 7.
@qwachansey, great post. As I was writing this post, I asked myself what QWAChansey would collect in this alternate universe, then realized what a dumb question that was. Of course, it would be exactly the same.
The high-end MTG market is driven less by playability than you might think. Alpha Underground Seas are several thousand dollars minimum while Revised Underground Seas, which have the exact same gameplay utility, are like $500. Since they are equally useful in play, the price gap is entirely a function of rarity and prestige. Using an Alpha Underground Sea in your EDH deck is like using a Ferrari to drive to the supermarket, whereas using a Revised Underground Sea is like using a Honda to drive to the supermarket. They’ll both get you to the supermarket, but you’ll look cooler in the Ferrari. Someone who buys a Ferrari solely to drive to the supermarket is buying it for the prestige and the ‘cool’ factor. Same thing with an Alpha Underground Sea. It’s not a matter of playability; it’s a matter of prestige. And the Alpha Underground Sea is prestigious precisely because it’s so rare. So I would argue that the price of playable Alpha cards isn’t driven by playability, but fundamentally by rarity.
And then the ultra high-end MTG market isn’t driven by playability at all. No one’s buying BGS 9+ Alpha power to play with. Sure, the P9 are powerful cards and that’s part of why they’re so desirable. But there are equally powerful cards in Alpha that aren’t part of the P9. And because they aren’t part of the iconic P9, they command significantly lower prices. An Alpha Sol Ring is worth less than an Alpha Mox Emerald not because the Sol Ring is less playable. If anything, Sol Ring is a more powerful card. It’s worth less because it’s more common and less iconic.
The high-end MTG market is super detached from playability at this point. When I paid $1200 for a mint condition foil JPN ONS Polluted Delta, I didn’t do so in order to play with it. I could’ve bought a KTK non-foil for $15. I did so because I was attracted to the rarity and prestige. That’s what the high-end MTG market comes down to.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but it doesn’t capture the whole story either. There are very few Pokémon collectors who are looking for a card “that will just lay flat in a sleeve” and that don’t care at all about HP or damaged cards. I’m not saying rarity doesn’t factor in, that’s obvious. But think about why Underground Sea is worth so much in the first place and there’s your answer. It’s hyper playable- if it were ever reprinted, the revised version would crash, because that price (which is now almost a thousand dollars) is almost entirely supported by playability. That’s different from something like Birds of Paradise, which has a dozen reprints at $10 and which still of course has an expensive Alpha version. Like I said, not arguing that. But it’s a fact of Magic that playability directly drives price.
My friends built a “gauntlet” with constructed Magic decks from our favorite era. It would be awesome and an interesting experiment to throw together those decks for Pokémon. Any idea where to get old decklists?
Yet if they reprinted Underground Sea, it wouldn’t impact the price of the Alpha version at all. Because the price of Alpha Underground Sea fundamentally isn’t because of playability. The price of Revised Underground Sea is because of playability.
Playability drives the prices of the low-end MTG market, but isn’t even close to the most important factor in the high-end MTG market.
The way I view it is that player demand sets the price floor for MTG cards simply because there will always be players trying to obtain the cheapest version of a card. So, even if you speculate on the future collectability of a card and it never pans out, the card will atleast have value as a game piece.
