‘Kids Can’t Buy Them Anywhere’: How Pokemon Cards Became a Stock Market for Millennials | Pokemon

pOkémon has been a huge game since the late 90s. Millions of people have fond memories of playing the original Red and Blue games, or trading cards on the field for the elusive shiny Charizard (if your school didn’t ban it). The franchise has evolved since then – but as far as trading cards are concerned, things have taken an unexpected and unfortunate turn. Newly released cards are now almost impossible to get thanks to the insane rise in resale and speculation over the past year.

Selling your old cards to collectors has always been part of the hobby, and like baseball or Magic: The Gathering cards, Pokémon cards can sometimes go for thousands of pounds. However, the Pokemon resale market has skyrocketed to the point where even new cards are worth hundreds, before they’re even released. The last set, Phantasmal Flames, had a rare special illustration of Charizard that was valued at over £600 before anyone found one. When a set of cards sells for around £4, there is a huge potential profit to be made.

This has led to the development of a speculative stock market around a card game in which adults pick up all the cards they can get, making it impossible for children, who might already want to collect or play the game associated with the cards, to get their hands on them.

Online, via retailers like Amazon, you can just order Pokémon cards, and then everyone enters an opaque drawing for the chance to buy them. And in the real world, meanwhile, sellers will stand in lines for hours outside stores, hovering around shelves as they restock, buying up each item before anyone else can see it — all just to purchase boxes that are often kept locked for later resale.

“My staff have threatened to come back and cut their heads off,” says Ben Thayer, owner of Bath TCG – an independent shop that specializes in trading card games. “It’s gotten quite annoying at times. I’ve heard of other stores where people have been attacked or there have been robberies. We’ve even seen people buy our products and immediately list them on Facebook, while they’re still in our carry-on bags, or sell them directly outside the store. We’re also careful about putting things on the shelf for the public because we don’t want to tempt that kind of behaviour. We used to sell entire boxes of booster packs but now we’ve had to stop doing that, and even put limits on individual packs.”

Finley Pink, from Keynsham, traveled to BathTCG arriving around two hours before opening time to secure some tickets at the final launch of the Phantasmal Flames set. He was the first in a line of 40 people. “This is the first set I got into early, as I couldn’t get the cards at other times. It’s a real struggle to find them,” he tells us. “Scalpers are making cards impossible to find. It’s crazy, and YouTubers talking about money are making things even crazier!”

Adding to the problem of scalpers is the popularity of YouTubers and TikTok influencers who record themselves opening packages, skimming through the contents at dizzying speed, listing card values ​​on the fly, and overreacting when they find a “hit.” Popular cards are discarded, and only high value cards matter. The joy of collecting or playing for fun is no longer the goal – it’s all about maximizing ‘value’.

Pete Sessions, a project manager from Bristol, attended a Pokémon play night at the store with his son Alfie, and expressed concern about the influence influencers would have on the hobby for his child. “I’ve been interested in Pokemon for a few years, but only started collecting the cards over the last six months – I’ve had to ask stores when their low stock days are just to try and find some,” he told us. “Two thousand YouTubers are watching and have become very aware of the ‘value’ of cards. I’m concerned about the perception that it’s easy to make a lot of money, when that’s probably not the case.”

“People are opening these amazing cards during the stream, but you don’t know how many thousands of packs they may have gone through, or how much money they’ve spent,” Thayer adds. “And then they feed you the good stuff — which stimulates dopamine — and you think, ‘Oh, I can do that!’ And then you spend a ridiculous amount of money hoping to get a hit.

The hype around the potential to make hundreds of pounds just by opening a pack of cards has fluctuated the market, so much so that people are now using apps like Collectr to track their card portfolio to see how prices rise and fall. This has also led to devious practices such as selling counterfeit cards, or opening and resealing packs after replacing any rare cards.

And all of this before the added layer of card grading industry comes into play. Cards may be sent to independent organizations, which evaluate and stamp the cards to increase their value, depending on the grade awarded. Card shows are now a staple across the country, with collectors searching for their favorite cards surrounded by those making trades sometimes worth tens of thousands.

Despite the fact that The Pokémon Company printed 10.2 billion cards in the year to March 2025, it is still struggling to keep up with demand. When reached for comment, she shared a statement from seven months ago, saying the company was “actively working to print more affected Pokémon TCG products as quickly as possible and at maximum capacity.”

Fortunately, there are signs that the resale market is starting to correct itself, as more supply of vintage devices is starting to return to shelves. “There are signs the market is collapsing — single-digit prices are going down, sealed products are going down,” says Thayer. “People are not as aggressive as they used to be.” “There are also a lot of people now thinking, ‘Christmas is coming soon and I need some money because I didn’t get what I hoped for. [from reselling cards]’. So we’ll see a decline, but early 2026 will be the 30th anniversary of Pokémon, so I think we’ll see another crazy period.

While many stores have now adjusted the prices of booster packs to reflect their perceived value and make the most of the Pokemon card boom, BathTCG refuses to give in to this temptation. “We wouldn’t do that to our clients,” Thayer says. “It’s hard as a business owner to say ‘I don’t want to make more money’, but I don’t want to be another one of those stores that is remembered for speculation. Once the bubble bursts and everything goes back to normal, I hope people will remember that we protected our community and looked after our players – and that we ensured our local customers got affordable cards.”