What amazes me is that Charizards can sell for so much when they are so worthless to the game. In MTG the most expensive card Black Lotus is basically broken and can be used in some formats and so actually desired by players. Charizard from the the original Pokemon base set is bad now. His HP is laughably low, his attack throws away tons of energy and it's a 3rd stage evolution making it slow and hard to get out. Even the buffed 2016 Pokemon Evolutions version isn't much more playable.
I don't think it's too surprising - cards from this era are primarily collector items, so among equal rarity cards, the most "iconic" ones are the ones that demand the highest price. Charizard had a pre-existing (and continued) level of popularity that made it the obvious most desirable card, even if it's not particularly playable. MTG didn't have the existing IP, so the cards that became iconic are more based around their playability, rarity, and associated mythos. Not too many people are dropping $20,000+ for a lotus to play it in vintage, but the prices continue to rise because of increasing collectibility. For what it's worth, Ancestral Recall is arguably a stronger card of equal rarity, but it's worth substantially less on the basis of being less iconic (if only slightly).
Is there a standard list of highly valuable MTG cards? I have a couple thousand cards from the mid-90s and while I’m sure they are probably worthless, I can’t bring myself to just dump them even though I haven’t played in 20 years.
Even though the Black Lotus value is mostly as a collector's item, in game, it has the advantage of being extremely versatile. As someone said, all decks are better with a Black Lotus. It is the most expensive because everyone wants it in their deck, no exception, and more than a one if it wasn't restricted (initially, it wasn't).
Ancestral Recall may be more powerful but it requires blue mana, which may be an issue in a non-blue deck, of course you can use a Black Lotus for that...
I remember being kid and other kids telling back then, when the card game was released, that a charizard was worth 500 francs (around 75€) and I didn’t really believed them. Funny how it raised to even crazier prices.
Someone gave me a free Ponyta, which I traded against other cards, growing my collection without buying any pack. One day I was with only three cards remaining but managed to trade again them for a bigger collection. My brother did the same, also with a free starting Ponyta. A year or so later, I bough two packs of the Fossils extension. A guy stole my whole collection in junior high school and I wasn’t able to bring it back. I still hate him to this day.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. I bet most of them are ending up framed on walls or what have you by people who wanted it in middle school. And I bet there's way more of those people than people playing the game.
Me and every friend I had in elementary school played with pokemon cards. We never once played the actual card game, just the gameboy game. The cards were closer to stuffed animals than utility items. If you played a card game it was YuGiOh because it was so simple.
In my experience, kids who played YuGiOh didn't play with the rules on the cards, but came up with their own rules. I grew up in Greece where most YuGiOh - age kids didn't know much English, so they couldn't actually read the cards. I realised that when I tried to play with some kids once and they kept telling me "no, that's not how this card is played, this is how it's played", because I was trying to play like it said on the cards. I think maybe they had derived the rules from watching the anime.
Black Lotus only can be played in Vintage, and even then it is restricted (1 card total in main/sideboard). It is more of a collectible because of its pure rarity more than anything now.
I've heard that Pokemon TCG card prices are more related to collectability and less related to in-game strength, when compared to Magic the Gathering. Some of the most sought after cards are first edition printings, or promotional cards.
I can virtually guarantee that out of any 10 people that are buying these cards, 9.9 of them have never played an actual game. Hell, I remember only playing one or two games with the cards as a kid back in the late 90s, and then the rest of the time was flexing your collection/haggling with other kids for trades.
Just so you know, Pokemon Trading Card Game is still alive and it has a pretty good online client[0] (that runs well on Wine). Poke me if you'd like a game someday.
I agree! It's much harder to play in person due to the pandemic though.
There's a bonus though: each new physical deck and booster pack that you buy is also redeemable online, so you can buy a deck or two, redeem their codes in the online version, and immediately start playing them there.
Yes but that require buying cards. Sometimes I want to do it to make friends, but that would require a decent time and money investment. And while I saw few girls playing it at the university, I think it’s mostly kids playing, so it would be a bit weird too (in addition to being a visible foreigner).
As an adolescent in the late 90’s, my friend group played the Star Wars version of this, Star Wars CCG. At the time I had cards worth $40-50 and thought if I held onto them for decades they’d be worth thousands. Looked them up recently and they’re going for... $20-30. Oh well.
Interestingly, unopened packs seem to fetch a fair amount, certainly more than their “expected value”, which aligns with my experience trading loot boxes on Steam.
> Interestingly, unopened packs seem to fetch a fair amount, certainly more than their “expected value”
Yeah it's a phenomenon seen in a few different CCG markets actually. Roughly 2 years after a set's release the Sealed box price and the EV start to drift apart.
I missed getting into Pokemon by a couple years, since it wasn't out until 1998. I was already playing MTG and Star Wars: CCG for a while by then, and didn't continue playing after ~2000. I similarly expected SW:CCG cards to grow in value more than MTG, especially with the prequels - but I think the production runs were significantly greater from the beginning and people had a long association with Star Wars figurines/toys/cards as collectibles being valuable before that. One interesting thing for SW:CCG is that the newer print runs can often now be more valuable than the older ones for SW:CCG, since each run saw fewer cards printed as the popularity dwindled.
Before the prequels, it was relatively easy to meet many of the Star Wars actors. I met Peter Mayhew and had him sign my Star Wars: CCG Chewbacca card at a comic convention. A lot of people seem to comment on what a nice person he was to meet, and I completely agree. David Prowse was less obviously likeable, but was also interesting to meet.
As a long-time Magic: the Gathering player it’s been fun introducing that to my kids and also learning Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh with them. I think Pokemon is slightly less satisfying than MTG without a lot of concerted deck building, and there’s a lot more to keep track of, but I do enjoy it. Yu Gi Oh I will just never understand. Absurdly complex, both at the macro level of the rules and the micro level of every card having a paragraph of tiny text to read.
My boy learned to play MtG to a pretty functional level way faster than these other games, and while I’d never call MtG’s rules simple I still think it has an elegance some of these other games lack, but obviously nostalgia and familiarity colour that.
I would be suprised if the most valuable collection of Pokémon cards was worth only $10M.
I personally know multiple people with card collections in excess of $10M. They are using it as a form of investment and it’s been their best performing asset class in the last several years.
While those collections are not of Pokémon cards, I’m sure that there must exist people who see Pokémon cards as an investment too and are similarly wealthy.
There's also a sort of survivor bias to it. If he were willing to cash in, then he wouldn't have a $10,000,000 collection and they wouldn't be writing a story on him
Pokemon will enter the NFT digital collectibles space, and it would be absolute crazy if they don't already have a team working on it.
All of these collectors are making assumptions based on information other collectors have shared about "how many are known to exist" etc., whereas NFTs are provably scarce and they never get scuffed up.
It's highly unlikely that The Pokemon Company would want it to be publicly known how many of each card are in existence, and even then they'd likely prefer hosting this on their own self-hosted and fully controlled database over a blockchain.
I doubt it. it is not like you could buy a bunch of cars and stick them in your closet. I've never found any commodity car that fun to drive compared to commodity EVs
Readit News
Ancestral Recall may be more powerful but it requires blue mana, which may be an issue in a non-blue deck, of course you can use a Black Lotus for that...
Someone gave me a free Ponyta, which I traded against other cards, growing my collection without buying any pack. One day I was with only three cards remaining but managed to trade again them for a bigger collection. My brother did the same, also with a free starting Ponyta. A year or so later, I bough two packs of the Fossils extension. A guy stole my whole collection in junior high school and I wasn’t able to bring it back. I still hate him to this day.
[0] https://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-tcg/play-online/
There's a bonus though: each new physical deck and booster pack that you buy is also redeemable online, so you can buy a deck or two, redeem their codes in the online version, and immediately start playing them there.
Interestingly, unopened packs seem to fetch a fair amount, certainly more than their “expected value”, which aligns with my experience trading loot boxes on Steam.
Yeah it's a phenomenon seen in a few different CCG markets actually. Roughly 2 years after a set's release the Sealed box price and the EV start to drift apart.
Before the prequels, it was relatively easy to meet many of the Star Wars actors. I met Peter Mayhew and had him sign my Star Wars: CCG Chewbacca card at a comic convention. A lot of people seem to comment on what a nice person he was to meet, and I completely agree. David Prowse was less obviously likeable, but was also interesting to meet.
My boy learned to play MtG to a pretty functional level way faster than these other games, and while I’d never call MtG’s rules simple I still think it has an elegance some of these other games lack, but obviously nostalgia and familiarity colour that.
I personally know multiple people with card collections in excess of $10M. They are using it as a form of investment and it’s been their best performing asset class in the last several years.
While those collections are not of Pokémon cards, I’m sure that there must exist people who see Pokémon cards as an investment too and are similarly wealthy.
All of these collectors are making assumptions based on information other collectors have shared about "how many are known to exist" etc., whereas NFTs are provably scarce and they never get scuffed up.