Incoherency Manifest: Why Can’t I Buy a Pokémon Card?

I have been regularly buying Pokémon cards for my own personal collection for over a year now, starting back in roughly December of 2023 when a new hobby store opened up near my common route of getting from my place to my at the time partner’s apartment. The warm colours of a hobby shop were inviting and piqued my curiosity right away as a refugee from the cold commute I would regularly undergo, and as such I would spend a few minutes to make a quick pit stop and buy a pack, or at most 2 packs of Pokémon cards. I had no idea what sets offered what, or even how to play the actual trading card game, but the card’s art was pretty and the store was warm so it became a habit. For the longest time I never noticed any issues with supply chains despite it being closer to the prime of supply chain woes from the pandemic in 2021, but now at the start of 2025 and for several months previous to today, the 3 current major sets of Pokémon TCG are completely sold out everywhere, absolutely everywhere. Surging Sparks, 151 and the highly anticipated (and not even released yet) Prismatic Evolutions are completely unattainable anywhere except for one place that will cost you an arm and a leg, internet resellers. As such, let us examine why the hell a hobby that has been consistently popular for the last 20 years has reached a point of uneasy stability and the current standings of its involved parties.

It can not be denied that Pokémon has undergone yet another resurgence since 2021 when the more evil of the Paul brothers, Logan Paul, managed to pull the legendary holo Charizard on stream from a sealed original set of Pokémon from 1998, pulling in nostalgia from people now into their 30s who remember their own cards as a child, reinvigorating sales of the TCG to new highs. During this time, there were of course issues with supply as what would be expected in a still Covid wrapped society would have, combined with the inability for production to be scaled up to meet demand that came to a degree out of nowhere, but it largely did not take a long time for this to settle and with prices stabilizing and products stocked on shelves. At first glance you might assume to a degree that this is what is happening now as well, that a rekindled interest in collecting Pokémon cards have driven prices sky high and left basically every local card shop, from the large chains to the more common mom and pop shops bone dry. But I am telling you, it is not. There is more interest once again, that can not be denied. But previous issues with supply were largely remedied by the company itself, in an attempt to insure that prices would not peak so violently again after the Logan Paul spell of interest. 

On October 30th of last year, a collaboration of 3 companies, DENA, Creatures Inc and the Pokémon company yielded a new app, the Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. A digital version of the TCG is by no means a new idea, with a previous versions of the same idea existing all the way back to the very start of the franchise in 1998 when a digital version, very aptly titled, Pokémon Trading Card Game released in Japan, and consistently new versions of this same idea have come to market in Japan, North America and elsewhere since. The issue however stems from the fact of the modern climate of social media. I don't need to really lean into the hows and whys of the fact that everyone understands that we are generally more glued to our phones than ever, and how we behave generally with trends, huge peaks and bigger falls. This of course happened with the new Pocket app, as when it was released it has seen a good steady increase in user activity much to the pleasure of the companies involved. Of course this is going to drive customers to likely also hop over into the physical TCG, but the fact that stores are completely sold out and no one for their life can buy cards currently can not be explained by this surge, already accounted for by  the Pokémon Company, so what does?

Surprise surprise it is influencers, or at least in part. Pokémon cards have fallen prey to quite literally a bull market. When card prices started going up in 2021 thanks to Paul, online card sellers saw a good increase in profits as the trend soared and adults would pay several months of savings to get a single piece of nostalgia. There is a crucial note to make here, that the online card stores that got a tidy profit were largely just online presence of existing in person stores. While of course some online only stores did exist, a huge majority were just another revenue stream for mom and pop shops to earn a bit of extra cash before the 2021 craze. This is where things differ so greatly to today. In the years since, outsiders saw the money to be made on the reselling of old cards along with reselling new cards to the emerging class of new collectors who continued beyond a temporary interest. These online stores started being able to sell individual high worth cards for record numbers, even while the sets themselves were still in print runs. Cards like the Evolving Skies Moonbreon were selling for close to a 1000$ USD before the print one was even close to finished. Inorder to drive these prices in the first place however, control of  the high worth cards needed to be cornered as much as possible, resulting in everyone's favourite new aspect of 2020s culture, scalping. These resellers would either charge hundreds for a new booster box (containing 36 individual packs and selling for roughly 180$ CAD at market) or in the more popular scenario, break up the boxes themselves to sell the individual high worth cards for anywhere 5$ to thousands each, while also commonly streaming their openings online to drum up even more money just from the act itself. This started an all too common self eating cycle, of streamers cracking packs on stream, gathering more interest in the hobby, having people purchase desirable cards at eye watering prices, bringing in more influencers to either talk about the trends of increasing sales or to promote an avenue for profit themselves, bring more people to hoard the cards available for purchase and then to return to cracking again for longer as to bring in more views and money. 

Now we arrive at the present time, where there are currently 3 highly desirable sets. The 151, which is only focused on the original 151 Pokémon that heavenly leans into the nostalgia market has been desirable for the last two years its been in print, with this latest wave of releases being a final run for the series. This is followed by Surging Sparks, the most recent release which featured an incredibly high amount of Illustrated Rare cards, cards which ditch the usual frame and format of TCG cards and instead mainly focus on art and are typically cheaper compared to less common and more traditional Secret Rare cards which often also fall into the realm of a ‘full art card’. The 3rd set is not even out yet, but is basically expected to sell out within minutes of its release at all stores, Prismatic Evolutions. Prismatic Evolutions is mainly focused on the eeveelutions and contains truthfully some jaw droppingly beautiful cards, the issue comes from the fact that scalpers will be far more successful in finding all of the desirable cards than joe schmo will, and those individual cards will be priced so much higher than other similar examples due to a desire for collections to complete the 9 card set of Secret Illustrated Rares. We have in fact already seen this play out exactly when the Japanese version of the same series, Terastal Festival hit stores last month and has been so completely sold out, with individual SIRs going for hundreds of dollars, while worth noting that Japanese language cards typically are priced a few notches down from their English counterparts, so it is scary to imagine what pricing will become on those cards so quickly. 

It goes without saying that this economic model for a hobby is not in any way self sustaining. The prices of 151 have not been increasing quite as sharply as many expected up to the end of its printing running with the most desirable cards only in the realm of a few hundred dollars. It also seems that the community in its entirety with the exception of online sellers and scalpers (with even youtubers and influencers on the correct side) in praying for the collapse of this system and for prices to both drop much more and also become far more stable during a production run unlike our current issues. I for one, can not wait till the scalpers get their comeuppance.

Thanks for reading my article! If you liked my writing and or are curious more about what I talk about, check out my newsletter Incoherency Manifest! You can find it best at https://incoherencymanifest.beehiiv.com/

EDIT: forgot to add date back in 2nd paragraph