Pokemon cards are out of control

I want to show you a card that's really special to me probably the card that got me collecting in the first place so in 2014 I went into a shop called game basically UK's version of GameStop I'd actually bought some packs months earlier on eBay that were very obviously weighed and got scammed like the seller had literally snipped holes in the packs to make sure there wasn't anything good in them I didn't want to get scammed again and without a single shred of social awareness I asked the poor dude behind the counter are these packs weighed and he just stutters looks at me like what I don't know clearly they weren't weighed because when I took them home and opened them one of the packs had this beautiful Monster of a card in it the silver dega secret rare I didn't even know what a secret rare was and ever since then I've been hooked Pokémon cards have been through a lot the past few years but now a whole new generation started and I wanted to dive back in again when I last talked about Pokémon cards things weren't in a good place the demand was crazy the scalping had got so bad that some stores were just straight up refusing to sell them because people were causing so much trouble so have things calmed down yes kind of Pokémon have definitely met the demand I read this figure the other day that stated that nearly 20% of all Pokémon cards were printed in 2022 alone this includes during Pokemon Mania of the '90s scalping isn't as much of an issue but it definitely still happens for certain products but surprisingly enough the problem isn't with the English cards anymore it's the Japanese cards I saw a video recently of a queue taken outside of retailer the night before a new set was due to release in Japan and the queue just keeps going and going out the shopping center into the streets much worse than anything we've seen for English cards and these are mostly people looking to resell stuff online it's wild because for as long as I've been collecting Pokémon cards the Japanese versions have always been so much cheaper than the English versions but now if you take say the new iono card that everyone's going nuts for the Japanese version goes for up to 10 times as much as the English one like I'm not complaining if I had a choice for the card to be cheapest in my native language I would choose that it's just so strange to me it's like everything I knew about collecting just doesn't make sense anymore but if you do want to step into the world of Japanese card collecting then a great way to do so is with the help of this video sponsor by they're proxy buying service that help you buy cool Japanese goodies generally speaking japanese cards and really just any Pokémon merchandise is much cheaper on Japanese sites than on English sites so it can be really helpful for example recently I used B to buy this five game lot which including fees and shipping came to around £70 total this game on its own would have cost more than that if I got it on an English site it's kind of just a no-brainer you can use B on tons of sites including Rakuten Yahoo shopping Yahoo auctions Pokémon Center and loads more and if you use my link in the description you can get a firsttime order coupon for 10% off huge thanks to baay for sponsoring this vid but back to card collecting so things are bad for Japanese card collectors right now but it's not much better for English card collectors either in my last video I did a comparison of two different sets to show just how unreasonable of a hobby collecting Pokémon cards has become the first set was the one that I started collecting with X and Y Furious Fists I estimated that if you were buying just all of the ultra rares from the set then you'd have to pay around $150 then I compared it to a more recent set sun and moon lost thund lost thund has an obscene amount of ultra R so it wasn't really a surprise that its total came out to over $1,200 I thought things couldn't really get much worse than that I was sorely mistaken I thought I'd calculate the total of one of the more recent sets and the total was one of the worst things my innocent eyes have ever been subjected to in the summer of 2021 there was a set called evolving Skies really cool set has a bunch of evolution cards in it while lost Thunder has 61 Ultra rares this one has 105 if you want to buy every single ultra rare from this set you'll need to spend over $2,000 I just don't have any words that is hor renders but to be honest I've always found the way Pokémon cards are valued to be quite strange because value doesn't have a lot to do with how rare something is at all the main factor that drives an item's value is Charizard no but really probably 90% of a card's value lies in how popular that particular character is it has very little to do with the actual Rarity for example take the sword and shield set brilliant Stars the most valuable card in the set is the alternate art Charizard V which as of writing the script has a market value of over $120 there are three other alternate art cards in this set which I would imagine are all about as rare as the Charizard but they're not going to go for anywhere near as much because they're not Charizard oh let's look at a much older set diamond and pearls secret wonders what do you think the most valuable card in that set is probably the super cool God of War level X right nope Charizard Hollow this thing is worth $200 several times what the actual Ultra RS in the set are worth according to TCG player the least valuable Holo in this set is jumpluff coming in at just over $4 meaning that this Charizard is worth 45 times more than the jump fluff it's is it any rarer than jumpluff no it's just Charizard I want Justice for jumpluff it's such a nice card too he's just floating in the wind having a Merry Old Time I say it's better than the Charizard there are lots of other factors that can influence how valuable a Pokémon card is though of course the Pokémon on the card how old it is how big of a print run it had even how competitive a card is in the actual trading card game I have a tragic tale I can tell you back in 2017 one of the most valuable Pokemon cards was the tapoo lelay GX it was seriously viable in the competitive scene so everyone wanted it from what I remember the regular GX was selling for upwards of $50 a card with the full art and rainbow rare being close to $100 each and I had seven of them I don't know why I just kept pulling it over and over so I sat smug on my pile of Pokémon card money I wonder how much they're worth today probably like a million3 so it turn turn out once the card got rotated out of the competitive scene no one wanted it anymore and now it's gone down in value by more than 10 times not my best financial decision all this to say that I try not to take Pokémon card value too seriously because it's not real personally I'm much more interested in cards that are genuinely rare and obscure even if they're not as valuable or popular for example in my opinion one of the coolest things I own is this Pokémon countdown calendar from 2008 yeah no a set booster box but it's obscure it's basically this Advent calendar where for each day you get a card with a little foil snowflake printed on it that's cool they only just started making them again last year but I got the original I think some of my favorite cards in my collection are error cards a few years ago I got this dark Cry EX in a trade I only wanted it because it's super messed up this is what you'd call a crimped card meaning that during manufacturer it got caught in the machine and sealed with the outer Packaging Isn't that cool or one time I pulled possibly the most miscut Mewtwo level X that exists error cards are usually One of a Kind items these cards would never get a PSA 10 but they're special they get a PSA 10 in my heart what I love about the Pokémon TCG is there's so many different ways to enjoy it some people like to play the competitive game imagine that some people like to get the best possible grade for all of their cards some don't even open cards at all and just like to keep sealed collections and some people just like the pretty pictures I fall into the latter category I think what brings me the most Joy with Pokemon cards is collecting sets I mean I don't actually finish sets because you can easily spend thousands trying to complete a single set and I need the money to buy Essentials what I mean is I enjoy the process it's hard to describe the amount of Joy I feel after opening a new set and putting all the commons and uncommons into a binder it's just so therapeutic like I know I'm never going to have all the cards but it just makes me happy now if you were to ask me if you should open Pokémon cards usually my answer would be no save yourself while you're still can but I think it depends how you're doing it just getting a few packs to open up for a bit of fun is pretty harmless but when you're buying packs and packs just to try and pull one specific card that's where it can become a problem if there's a specific card you want the vast majority of the time you will save a lot of money by just buying said card yes I know it's not as fun as if you pull it yourself but you know what's also not fun spending more money and not having the card you want if you really have an itch to open Pokémon cards I think the best value for your money is going to a pre-release they hold these a couple of weeks before they release a new set and you get to open cards before they're even out and play matches with people don't worry you don't need to be good at the game I suck and I still have fun even if you don't get anything too great from your packs they're still a really fun experience and I definitely recommend giving them a try if there's one near you the new generation of Pokémon cards are out now and there are some changes EXs are back now again they've gotten rid of the rainbow R thank goodness they were kind of fun at first but when every set has 20 secret rares that are the exact same as other cards in the set except rainbow it's kind of exhausting it's really funny because the rainbow rare trainer cards would often sell for less than the regular full art versions even though they're meant to be rarer because people don't like rainbow rares don't get me wrong the scarlet and violet set still have an obscene amount of ultra RAR but at least most of them look different they're really going all out on the alternate art cards and Pokémon cards feel more alive than they ever have it probably helps that the iconic yellow borders are now gone I know they're classic but when they're trying to make these immersive full art cards it was kind of an eyes saw I'm sorry something I'm sad about is that they removed the set logos the little symbols at the bottom of the card I know this is for consistency with the Japanese sets but I really liked the little pictures like look at this the first sun and moon set had this cute little logo over sun and moon but for the first scarlet and violet set we get sv1 e it doesn't hit the same they've also massively changed the pole ratios going forward now you get a guaranteed three Holo Cards per pack which is massive and the ultra rares and Alternate Arts have much better pull rates too and so I'm going to completely contradict everything I said in this video and open a load of Pokémon cards the Pokémon company actually very kindly sent me an elite trainer Bo box of Pala evolved but to be completely transparent I think I had probably the unluckiest polls I've ever had from an Elite Trainer Box I mean even I say that it's healthy to manage your expectations with Pokémon cards but this was just something else just very much statistically improbable the vast majority of people who buy any TV are going to get much better PS it happens it's not the Pokémon company's fault and I'm still hugely grateful that they even thought to send me anything but I felt like that box was a very big outlier and not accurate to what the normal card opening experience is like and I know people want to see me pull big cool shiny cards so I bought some of the cool new 151 set let's open them all right it's time again I've got my eyeless toric for good luck actually a pretty nice box so we should have nine packs of Pokémon card goodness and a promo of a tired guy it is currently 3:00 a.m. I too am a tired guy all right nine packs basically we win if we get the Charizard or the girl card either one of those is acceptable all right let's go oo is it got something it's got a hollow Hol star me really love that artwork I swear the packs used to open the other way around like like the code would be on the other side but now it's here back in my day hello chansy neoc King Vaporeon did you know I just noticed that I missed a hollow energy in my last pack they know how rare they are still cool ooh ooh I see a treat what we got we got Charmander I imagine that's a good one to get not quite Charizard but we're getting there and Machamp Holo all right this is exciting I can see something textured Charizard Charizard Charizard giovan's Charisma I'll take it very nice Aerodactyl oh it's a good one zapados and a Holo energy last pack is a vile plume all right so these are the poles definitely a lot more fortunate than the Pala box surprisingly I think I just about broke even on this box because of the Charmander this is the power of Charizard but even if we didn't break even on the box it's all good cuz we're just having a bit of Pokemon card fun and because either way it's going on my tax return

Channel: CandyEvie

Views: 383,564

Keywords: pokemon, pokemon cards, pokemon trivia, pokemon tcg, pokemon scalping, pokemon card scalping, pokemon scarlet and violet cards, pokemon 151, candyevie

Id: 2WlILlAMJak

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023