When a fellow Pokémon card collector found out I was going to Japan, his eyes lit up. “Can you maybe look for some cards for me?” he asked. “Sure!” I said. Since I collect almost exclusively English cards, I wasn’t expecting to need much time hunting cards for myself anyway. So might as well keep an eye out for a friend!
Initially, my friend only mentioned a handful of cards to look out for. But the longer I was there, the more he sent. Still, overall, the number of cards was manageable, and in every shop I went, which ended up being a lot more shops than I had anticipated, I scoured the shelves for some interesting picks for me as well as for his desired cards.
My friend is a better deal hunter than I am, and so, naturally, he included maximum prices for each card he wanted. This was helpful. After all, who wants to end up sitting on a card they don’t want because they breached some invisible price limit their friend was never willing to pay?
Over time, however, an interesting gap between the two people I was browsing for—aka me and him—emerged.
I bought a good chunk of my target cards in the first store I walked into. They had a lot of the Eeveelutions I wanted in great condition at good prices—so I struck! Later, I kept discovering them elsewhere, some for even slightly better prices, but I never regretted my purchase. Whenever I saw something I felt was cheap, would appreciate soon, or I could resell the extras without any losses, I grabbed it.
In the end, I bought more than I had intended, and few cards were absolute steals—but all of them were good value, and I ended up reselling some of the spares a few months later at higher prices to recoup a decent portion of my costs.
My friend’s prices, meanwhile, I soon realized were too prohibitive. Even in Japan, the hobby was booming, and his prices were unrealistic. Dream deals that might have been possible a year before, but not at the time. I told him, but he didn’t update his list, and so, even though I kept looking, in the end, I only got him one card—and that one he didn’t want. I was surprised how cheap it was, and I only found out at the hotel that its back was pretty banged up. Ironically, even that one I turned a small profit on later.
It’ll soon be a year that I was in Japan. By now, prices have risen yet again. From today’s point of view, everything I bought back then looks like a steal. At the time, some people, my friend included, would have said I was paying too much. But now, I wonder: How much value did he miss out on because he didn’t want to spend 10%, 20% more per card?
In the Pokémon hobby, there’s a persistent group investors call “the MSRP gang.” MSRP stands for “Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price.” Nowadays, almost no one sells Pokémon cards at that price. Even big retailers, like GameStop, ignore the suggestion and charge market rates—which are often double or even triple of what The Pokémon Company recommends.
This group of collectors insists on only buying at the cheap prices we were used to until late 2023—and they consistently get left out. Nowadays, people with serious money flood into the hobby. Pokémon is turning into an asset class, and rich folks want to play, too. To someone who can casually spend $100,000 on shiny cardboard, it doesn’t matter whether they pay $10 or $20, $400 or $500, or $1,000 or $2,000 on some card, box, or product. If they think it’s cheap compared to what it’ll cost a year from now, they’ll buy it. And figure out how much profit exactly they can make later.
We love talking about fair prices and getting outraged when we believe they are not. “How dare they charge us two euros for a liter of fuel!” “When I was young, this was…” “I’ll spend exactly $45 on this card, not a cent more!” But prices, like all things, are relative. And what’s “fair” is mostly an idea we make up in our heads. Don’t let the wrong version of that idea keep you from meeting opportunities as they arise—and when in doubt, tell your friend to just buy the card.
