Will the narrative on ultra modern ever change?

[pokefitart]

I’ve been out of all things pokemon for the majority of this year. Buying, selling, opening new sets, older sets, consuming content on here and YouTube (but not Reddit ever ) etc.

Thankfully I’m coming back into it in all aspects and catching up on what I’ve been missing over the last week or so.

Again I see the narrative on modern/ultra modern. A quick filter made it very easy to find some comments with people disregarding modern/ultra modern. However after price checking all XY and S&M boxes, etbs and loose packs that I was surprised with the supply and pricing ( on Cardmarket in Europe anyway) of the mentioned products… I was surprised to see the price increases of the above mentioned products despite people saying there’s too much out there, too much being hoarded etc.

The same type of comments can be said in todays time of the SWSH era and sets like Chilling Reign (and the Rudy video where he bought 3-4000 boxes at 80 usd and everyone laughed at him) Fusion Strike and now Lost Origin.

I mean no offence to the below who said the same type of things back in 2018-20 about the XY & S&M blocks. Yet at least in Europe the vast majority of XY & S&M boxes have gone down to single digit availability and well over the €100 for a box and €3-4 a loose pack/sleeved pack.

2020 - “Just a few years ago everyone was saying "too many reprints! modern cards won’t ever be worth anything, it’s overprinted, you can’t give it away. why is (insert one of several xy/sun moon sets) pack still in these new tins 2 years after it was released?’

2020 - The big problem now is that there are many more people who are outright investing in sealed product or having sealed “collections”. That’s a big problem because everything is supply and demand. If everyone is “investing” in modern sealed then guess what happens in the future? Supply is still high because everyone has a closet full of sealed product. If supply is high then prices will not appreciate.

Anything after phantom forces is probably not investable because of the massive print runs. Just look at the comment’s from smprattes video about modern product.

2020 - Who knows 10 years down the line it may be valuable, but with the amount of people hoarding them, the number of cards being graded will not end even in 20 years from now and i’m sure once it hits a certain price point acceptable to the hoarders, the market will be flooded with them.

2018 - Supply. There are videos on youtube of people buying and sitting on (literally) pyramids of new product composed of dozens of booster boxes. There’s no telling how many people are out there doing this but it’s definitely not a few. There will be a steady supply of new product for the next 20 years and then some.

Reprints - As demonstrated with Roaring Skies, there’s no telling when the Pokemon Co. will decide to reprint a set or whether they will do it 1:1 etc. It’s all up in the air. You could buy several boxes only for them to be worthless 10 years from now due to a reprint.

2018 - Look at Jungle and Fossil, it took 19 years for them to go from $3 to $30 with smaller print runs than we have today.

Late XY and SM product is more available than any other generation right now.

2018 - Low print runs will directly influence value. In SM there is no inaccessible card, no tough grade, no real chase. Prices won’t collapse but there’s not much room for growth.”

I don’t believe the sets such as brilliant stars, crown zenith, silver tempest and the SV block
sets will be any different in a few years time and anyone tracking the availability of booster boxes, loose packs or etbs on Cardmarket will see the numbers dwindle down and prices rise.

Also I just want to clarify I own zero SWSH era booster boxes or sealed product with the exception of a cosmic eclipse build and battle kit that a got as a gift from a good friend in the hobby. My investments are my house, stocks and a small bit of gold and bitcoin not cases of pokemon product.

Glad to be back on here and catching up on all the error cards people having being posting and seeing peoples collections continue to grow

[eeveeteam]

We are living in the junk wax era right now and no one knows it yet. What is driving modern demand? People seeing vintage go up in value over 20 years. People think that is repeatable with modern. But it’s not - everyone is a closet full of modern investor and everything is kept pristine. Vintage is valuable because it was played with and thrown out by our moms (or for me, my aunt). Pokemon is overprinting right now to keep up with this “demand” to fill the closets.

The same thing happened with baseball. 50s and 60s cards are worth a lot. People started realizing this in the 80s and started hoarding. But they are worth a lot because the cards went into bicycle spokes. Baseball cards were overprinted in the 80s and 90s, creating their junk wax era.

[wisewailmer]

Idk, if you like modern buy it and keep it. If you don’t like modern, buy it and sell it when it doubles in 3 months so that you can buy vintage or whatever else you like.

Won’t last forever, but either way you’re ending up with stuff you like, while not ignoring the current free money

[pokefitart]

Only seven Cosmic boxes listed. At €930 you think there would be some sort of people dumping their hoarded collection if their entry point was €90-100.

I’m not disagreeing with you at all, my mom dumped my beat up jungle and fossil cards but in the same time I’ve seen Dragon Ball Super cards lose 80-90% of this value from peak highs in the boom but the same can’t be said for Pokemon sealed items.

[eeveeteam]

Should have added anything post 2020 where the “investors” were born

[pfm]

I think it’s all about time horizon. At this point anyone who says “this item can’t go up because too much of it was printed” hasn’t been paying attention for the last 5 years.

Supply is not the most relevant thing in the short term. Demand is. That’s why pop 1billion Grey Hat Pikachu is still hundreds of dollars in PSA 9 or 10. Sealed modern is printed at unprecedented levels but continues to do well because so many people want it.

Modern supply is massive but prices still often move up.

I think a point of fair skepticism and probably what most people are thinking is on a much longer time horizon. Demand in Pokemon has always fluctuated. In 15-20 years when Pokemon releases another 63-85 sets, will modern today still be relevant? Will there be enough active demand to support thousand-dollar pricepoints for items with gem mint populations of 10,000+?

tldr, I think the people that sell modern short are not giving it enough credit for it’s short-term potential. And simultaneously, I think a lot of the modern stonkers overestimate how strong the demand for the cards will be in the long-term.

[johto]

Not to derail and maybe not even that hot of a take, but watching other nonsensical zero intrinsic value assets soar in modern times leads me to believe that whatever rationality once moved markets is just plain gone. My attitude is changing.

I would love to believe in the old O, R, M, B fundamentals but I feel that genuinely no reason at all is needed anymore for things to completely defy traditional market movements. Or nothing outside of “hype” and traction.

People love Pokémon, it’s still extremely popular with children today, and the world we live in now is incredibly swayed by “social media” and no matter how much I want to hope it’s going to go away, I don’t think it is. People say we’ll reach tipping points with various things and I really hope it’s true, but I’m not sold.

Just my take anyway, I feel like the only thing I can tell people who ask me what card/asset class is going to do what is “Truthfully, I don’t know anymore.”

[thsigma]

The cabal works in mysterious ways…

[fourthstartcg]

Hindsight is always 20/20. It’s much easier to look back on old comments about modern and laugh (in part rightfully because most of us, including myself, were dead wrong) than consider the context of those comments and how things might have played out differently. Just like in 5-10 years it will be easy to go back and laugh at whichever “side” gets it wrong now. You never know a bubble is a bubble until it bursts…or it never bursts.

However, there are often some misrepresentations about the “anti-modern” position. I don’t think people are arguing that modern will be worthless or is uninvestable, but rather that the risk of modern is too high. As @pfm mentions, the modern market is entirely predicated on demand. Supply is effectively irrelevant. However, this only works if demand stays steady. If demand goes down, supply will become very relevant very fast.

It also helps to have the benefit of hindsight when looking at what sets go up in value. Sure, you mention Chilling Reign and Fusion Strike. What about Vivid Voltage, Darkness Ablaze, and Champion’s Path? These 4-year-old sets are barely keeping up with inflation and you’d likely lose money once fees are factored in if you didn’t buy at or below MSRP. These sets were considered surefire investment wins when they released, but were quickly overshadowed by newer and more exciting cards. Who cares about Rainbow Charizard VMAX and Chonkachu when we have Moonbreon? What’s to say that won’t happen again with the ultra-modern sets of today?

I wouldn’t bet against modern sealed product. But if I’m trying to be safe, I’m not putting all my eggs in the modern basket either.

[tidaldreams]

main problem with modern is that although it can go up by 100% in one month it can just as easily go down by 80% in the same time. with vintage psa 10 at least in the current state, it is probably not going to shoot up to the moon but it wont plummet overnight either

[thsigma]

Rudy’s investment in CHR and Pokemon in general is rooted in his ability to source whatever product(s) he wants, at whatever price he wants, whenever he wants, at whatever quantity he wants. He can also offload it considerably easier than just about anyone else and can afford to sit on it for years on end. AFAIK, Rudy’s initial Pokemon buys during the XY/SM era were not because he believed in Pokémon’s longevity. He was left with massive quantities because: A. no one wanted product and the sets at the time weren’t great, B. he couldn’t sell what he already had, and C. He could afford to sit on it vs selling at a loss.

From 2020 to now, it looked like he had some huge big brain insight when thats not really the case. To be fair, I’m sure Rudy has mentioned before that he thought Pokemon was dead back in those bathroom videos, so its not like he has claimed that Pokemon was always gonna be the stonk dogger. It was a “good” investment to buy as much as he did, but I don’t think Rudy’s ability to buy thousands of boxes means that modern sealed is the way to go for most collectors and individuals looking to make some money

Also, take EVERYTHING that Rudy says with a grain of salt. He likes to hear himself speak and has made hundreds of videos showcasing this. His numbers on CHR have also fluctuated in terms of quantities bought, prices bought at, and “current” market prices of his held products. I’m just nitpicking there though…I still like his videos.

Unrelated to the Rudy stuff, I do think Pokemon modern is a fine way to go for anyone tbh. I think that most people have short term memories though and get too focused on the daily/weekly/monthly trends. If modern sealed is truly the best investment out there, it shouldn’t matter what people are buying, when, and at what price. lotta noise out there for an otherwise simple investing strategy

[pokecollectoramy]

Just keep in mind that while pokemon printed an outrageously high 9 billion cards last year, sports card makers printed an estimated 70 billion each year in the late 80s!

That being said, no one is going to care about your sealed surging sparks box in 15 years. Facts.

[Vertemes]

EVERYONE STOP TALKING ABOUT INVESTING IN MODERN AND INVEST IN THIS:

furret walk - full song (1 hour)

I’ll see myself out.

[jupitersailfish]

I’m 35 minutes in, what am I looking for???

[Dyl]

[BANKS]

@pokecollectoramy

[printed] an outrageously high 9 billion cards

I’ve seen that figure mentioned before, but I think it would be more useful to adjust for bulk. Most cards printed are not part of the modern market i.e. commons, uncommons, rares are considered bulk and sold by length of stack at my lcs. Bulk cards are essentially pack opening waste that goes to players but mostly does not participate in the modern collector’s market.

If we could adjust the 9 billion printed figure to account for the amount of rr, rrr, hr, sr, ssr, ur, sar printed then I think that would give us a better idea of actual supply. Out of 9 billion cards printed, I would conservatively guess that less than a billion are collectible.

[pokecollectoramy]

Let’s be ultra ultra conservative and say just 1% of the overall supply is collectable. That number is still 90 million cards. This is not small in an era where grading is easy and accessibility is not an issue. Hell, sets like twilight masquerade, which aren’t even considered “good” sets, already have more cards graded in 6 months than aquapolis has in almost 20 years. That’s an arbitrary comparison sure, but if you were collecting/investing for the long term, I know which one I would prefer.

[Coop13]

@fourthstartcg

Hindsight is always 20/20

Hindsight is 2020

[codytcas]

I’ve said it before but I just don’t think 5, 10, 15 years from now anybody is going to give a crap about SV other than 151. Especially with how much of this stuff gets graded now. Why would I buy boxes and packs hoping to pull the card I want when I could just go buy most of those cards in PSA 10 for less than the price of one ETB?

My local Target and Walmart can’t give this stuff away. Target is literally doing overflow sections to make room for all these SV sets.

[pokefitart]

That is a very valid point. The smartest thing to do is buy the cards you want, singles or slabbed versions. However that also is the complete opposite of what irrational people are doing with product.

Im not too sure of current PSA 10 for modern cards (Im yet to get back to prices of chase cards) but if the logical thing is to buy the PSA 10, why, like this person did spend 3k USD this year to open a Team Up build and battle kit. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3oFN0opHQDE

Collect pokemon was doing a live stream earlier this morning and people were paying 600 CNY (about 80 euros) for boxes of Terastal Festival ex… Though whilst the circumstances are slightly different, people still pay Pokerev stupid money amongst many other people a lot of money to open product when the easier thing to do would be buy that PSA 9 or 10 card.

They are feeding off and exploiting the general consumer who clearly prefers to pull x chase card than just buy it outright and overpay on those packs in hope of it being pulled for them.

Until that mentality shifts, I cant see see anything with a decent chase card(s) from mid XY onwards to present day SV not be in demand until people realise how much money they are blowing tearing through masses of sealed product.