Cecilily discusses the financialisation of Pokemon cards as an investment vehicle.
It’s one thing that makes me pause in teaching my niece how to play, I don’t want her to get caught up in the abstraction of the cards as anything other than pieces of cardboard with funny pictures of animals
One thing Pokemon does pretty well though is keeping the collector side and the player side largely separate. If you just want to buy singles of the cards you need to play, that’s cheap. You can get a top tier competitive deck for like $50-100 last time I checked, which is dirt cheap in the TCG space.
The high value Pokemon chase cards are like alt arts and stuff, the normal versions of good cards are usually plentiful. Unlike a game like Magic where all the highest power cards are also the most expensive.
You can get a top tier competitive deck for like $50-100 last time I checked, which is dirt cheap in the TCG space.
Wait, I can get a competitive Pokemon deck for the same price as a competitive Pauper MTG deck?
man wtf is MTG
man wtf is MTG
Collector prints and crossovers now. In the end, Phyrexia won 😔
Hey guys it’s your friend, Homer SimpsonTM! Don’t you love The Simpsons©? Now you can experience The Simpsons© in card format!
alf is back, in magic the gathering form
Pokemon tcg sells boxes called trainer toolkits that contain a ton of meta cards, usually the release of a new one lowers the price of all the staples that you see in most decks.
This keeps the price of base rarity cards low and pushes the price of the art versions of playable cards down too.
I always thought MTG should have done the same thing where they make a pack of “10 random art basic lands of one/two colors” and sell them for like 3 bucks. Maybe toss in a few lightning bolts and land tutors in there too, idk
When i went through and sold off my old old cards i was amazed how much the bolts were worth still. When every deck runs 4 of something it doesn’t matter how commonly they show up in packs i guess
The flip side is that if you want to crack packs and make decks with what you get from packs it’s prohibively expensive because collectors. So it really only is cheap if you know the deck you want to build and go build it rather than playing with cards you get from packs.
This is true, but if you want to teach a kid to enjoy card games in a healthy way, then teaching them to bypass the predatory gacha bullshit because it sucks and is designed to devour all their money is the correct way to go.
at that point, just buy deck building board games?
Correct take detected, close the thread.
That’s a really good insight thank you. It does largely reflect my experience getting back into the game . literally decades after I first picked it up. We have a few pre-made sets, three from the Battle Academy training set (Pikachu, Armarouge, Darkrai) $45 and one my brother was able to find at a retail store (Team Rocket Mewtwo) $90 AUD. I have some Chinese decks that were cheaper, so all in all we have eight decks that were about $150 aud. It’s not something she can buy with her own pocket money, it’s definitely christmas or birthday gift territory. The fun of building your own deck with singles is probably a bit further down the track, so far we’ve only mucked around with swapping like for like (like an ampharos in the Pikachu deck, and a rotom for a pachirisu).
That’s cool to hear, I had some anxiety about potentially playing it again (after a 25 year hiatus lol), was worried it might have went further off the deep end in lootbox greed or something.
You could show your niece how cool proxying is
Good suggestion
Yeah it sucks because the actual card game was pretty fun for a while.
People forget that Pokemon started out as a bunch of dorks making an homage to bug catching. Pokemon’s own success kind of fucked it over.
I’d say the bigger something gets, the more likely it is the investor ghouls come out and strip it for parts.
Did I already rant about my friend who bought $3000 of cards and they’re just sitting on a table til he can onsell them for 20%+? He just said he paid something like $100 annual for an ebgames member account and he would preorder everything he could. He didn’t even know the names of the box art mons
Sorry but I truly hope your friend ends up holding the bag
Likewise but sadly he can afford to take the hit, he has a regular turnover of mtg, baseball and basketball cards too, so Pokemon tcg is just a different market he’s ‘diversified’ into
Can you ask him who the hell is buying these off of him?
Anyone who actually wants the product. Scalpers like that asshole buy literally everything, so if you want any of it you have to buy from them.
Sure, but do people want pokemon cards bad enough to pay that much?
In total sales, Pokémon is as big as Star Wars and Harry Potter combined. No other media franchise is better at parting people from their money. Yes, Disney makes more money, but only because they own a ton of different brands. Individually, none of them come close to Pokémon in sales.
Yes
I was lucky enough to get a big costco box that, after sales tax, cost me $72 CAD(14 packs, promo cards, etc)
The cheapest one could see for that same box on marketplace was $200. Local card shops were selling it for $300
Yes people will pay a lot
It sure ain’t me
I hate that
I’m a Garbage Pail Kids collector. Or should I say was… eBay and Topps’ artificial scarcity have ruined what was once a fun hobby. Now every new set is an opportunity to get fleeced.
We knew a week in advance a Valentine’s Day set was coming. $60 a box. Sold out in 3 minutes. Almost immediately they were on eBay, some listing for as much as $250!
Sorry for the rant.
Boil all Finance Bros
Ohhh, now I get why all the shops I used to buy TTRPG books at are just Pokemon and MTG now, and all the TTRPG books I find (not counting D&D and Pathfinder etc) are expansions with no core books
Cecilily is has some cool vids on her channel, she does a good job at presenting some Pokemon-hobby related issue as a way to bait and hook in casual viewers and before you know it, boom critiques of capitalism, I would recommend her to slightly woke normies who like Pokemon ig
I think it’s a good idea to generally steer clear of anything that’s basically gambling, particularly gambling targeted at kids. Collectible-focused card games, gacha games, games focused on loot boxes.
Started with MagicTCG. Hasbro just has them spitting out tons of slop, it’s sad.
Wdym you don’t like jumbo cactuar
We’ve got harry potter themed cards I thought you liked the potterverseI have such a hard time with this because on the one hand a lot more of my friends are suddenly playing magic the gathering, on the other hand I’m playing commander against Aang and the 12th doctor.
And before that Hasbro was also fucking shit up by having them spit out ever more gimmicky blocks. Mark Rosewater talked in his Drive To Work series about keywords and complexity - how a game has a sort of ceiling for how complex it can be, before it becomes incomprehensible. Playing now I constantly need to look at cards and I have no fucking idea what’s going on with dungeons and sagas (though I do love sagas, they’re kind of straightforward, but still, there’s too much going on) and 17 bajillion keywords everywhere. 10.000 needles isn’t a fucking keyword, fuck offffMark Rosewater talked in his Drive To Work series about keywords and complexity - how a game has a sort of ceiling for how complex it can be, before it becomes incomprehensible
Oh that sounds like some fun game theory I’ll check that podcast out
1208 episodes
So I couldn’t find the episode, but this is an article where he touches on the same subject, from around the time that episode would have been out I think. https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/lenticular-design-2014-03-31
12 years ago… Christ.I haven’t listened for years and don’t think I could get back into it. If I were to I would go some years back - to when he didn’t have to defend dogshit game design and then I’d pick an episode with a title that interested me. He used to be a pretty good yapper that would say interesting stuff.
I quit playing edh/commander as soon as it started to smell like fortnite and I’m glad i switched to the children’s monster game
Commander turned to shit shortly after they started making precons for commander. The first few decks were decent value for money and then they turned on the moneymaker. It sucks so much. It used to be a fun little thing where you found a legendary and decided to have some fun with it, see what you could squeeze out and now it’s just slop and every single legendary is made with commander in mind and it has a bahillion effects and ugh.
Take me back to the days of kitchen-table “canadian highlander” with Krenko and TalrandFor real. Back when you would read one line of text on a card and it would turn into the entire floor covered in cards because you had an idea for a deck.
Back when "you got that deck off the internet! " was an accusation, not an assumption
Back when you would read one line of text on a card and it would turn into the entire floor covered in cards because you had an idea for a deck.
Original Innistraad block
And now it’s all just content. Feel like shit, just want him back - “Him” is the collective reaction to Garruk’s Companion - A 3/2 for 2???It’s just a better bear has power creep gone too far
wotc ruins formats by designing cards for them. they should go back to focusing on what used to be a normal standard powerlevel, and let everything else be an accident handled by the community/an organized play body that isn’t beholden to the beancounters.
It’s not even that they ruin them out of maliciousness or anything - now it’s greed, but it used to just be a sort of accident.
The whole concept of formats like EDH or pauper was basically a jailbreak or a refitting. “Hey what if we used this machine for something it wasn’t supposed? It will be janky, but it could be fun!” It’s like when people refit TTRPGs or mod video games to be in other settings. As soon as it is embraced by the machine it changes the purpose.
Stealing from digimon smh
I’ve been playing Riftbound, the game itself is great but overall it’s completely ruined by the scalpers and investment bros.
And proxying is hardly an option because you can only really play with mutliple people on tournaments and proxies aren’t allowed, also people tend to get defensive about this I think, because they have spent money on the game and want it to still be meaningful.
also people tend to get defensive about this I think, because they have spent money on the game and want it to still be meaningful
Gatekeeping the crab bucket
It’s so silly. But printers have gotten pretty good I hear. Better foils than what WOTC deliver at least.
I’ve never had someone inspect any of my cards closely enough that they’d even be thinking about whether it’s “fake” except for when I’m playing commander and I drop an OG dual land and before they can finish the question I’m picking it up to show them the “you wouldn’t download a card” cardback lmao
Where do you get you prints done?
I always used mpcautofill, so makeplayingcards.com does the prints
‘friend of the channel Carl has been predicting this for a while’
reminds me of a video from a few months ago where this guy was explaining how hard getting cards is nowadays, lineups of mostly scalpers an hour before the store opens
Take the kid to local events, check the pokemon website and go to event locator. They are usually well labeled so avoid a “challenge” or a “cup” but i can almost guarantee* if someone’s opening packs at the store your kid will get some bulk for free.
*i give my bulk to kids and i see it happen, hopefully your area is similar
For casual play and deckbuilding the prerelase kits are usually for sale from older sets. Some are overpriced but if you find a reasonable couple boxes they contain one of a few different 40 card premade decks and 4 booster packs. For prerelease you get to swap any cards from the packs into the deck and play a tournament so they’re meant to be playable and simple since they’re intended to be the first look at a new set.
If you lived near me I’d just drop a box of cards on your head and thank you for taking them off my hands tbh
We’ve scoped out a local all ages league, and see how things go
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
