Pokémon cards do not have security features. They can easily be copied by any two-bit counterfeiter.Also, the Pokémon Company can print as many as they like.Seeing high value in them seems like a risky investment to me.

But bought very rare cards and kept them in mint condition?

&quot;I thought they looked nice and wondered whether they might be a good investment&quot;He did not care. It was his sons hobby, he collected them as a very remote investement, then forgot

Does anyone else think it&#x27;s odd that he had all these rare cards in mint condition and just... forgot about them? If you care enough to get complete sets of rare cards, how do you not care enough to know what you have?This isn&#x27;t the usual &quot;I have some old cards but they&#x27;re all trash&quot; story every one of us has had at some point.

The fact people did this sort of thing by accident is why the cards he had were valuable. If everyone who had cards as a kid still had them no ones would be worth very much.

I had at least that many, first generation as well, including a bunch of Japanese shinies that my mum found in a shop somewhere and bought for me.They all went into the loft at some point and later ended up in a bonfire along with my first edition Harry Potter book collection when my mum was doing a &quot;clear out&quot;. Such is life.

Good catch. I guess that shows I don&#x27;t know anything about pokemon or how many make a set anymore.

Just to clarify: it was 42 _sets_ of cards, not just 42 cards.

Eh don&#x27;t beat yourself up. Value for these sorts of things are extremely condition dependent, if you were playing with them then they would already not be in the condition to fetch these kinds of price.

As a child I had considerably more than 42 Pokemon cards, from that time range, and all in excellent condition with several &quot;shinies&quot;... all of which went into the washing machine because I left them in my pocket. Depressing.

Very likely not worth very much if that makes you feel any better. I recently did a quick check on my old Pokemon cards and there was nothing worthwhile

I had a big book of cards that I never sold but they somehow disappeared when I left for the service.

I vaguely remember reading an article at the height of the Nintengo cartridges valuation craze a few years back, that the guys behind the &quot;grading&quot; corporation which produced these insane valuations, were previously convicted scammers who went bust in dotcom and decided to try again.This whole story about assigning millions of dollars of value based on a state of ten cents worth of cardboard and shrink wrap is craziness. Same with obsessing about the imperfections on the playing cards.

But as soon as you play the game with them, they immediately devalue.It&#x27;s just gambling and a greater fool dependent market all over again.

It&#x27;s literally a card game. You can argue the utility and use case are stupid, or wildly less than the cost would suggest, but it&#x27;s silly to say there is no utility, even if most collectors don&#x27;t play the game.

&gt;infinite printing supplyMuch like other collectibles all the most valuable cards are so long out of print that even if they were reprinted exactly as they were they would not receive the same valuation by the collectors because they are not the originals.But the boom in old pokemon cards still drove demand for modern pokemon cards so much so that more pokemon cards have been printed post 2020 than the two decades before it despite the fact that “rare” cards you can obtain in new sets only go for hundreds to thousands at most and yet people still gamble on new pokemon card packs.

It is gambling, with some valuable &quot;pulls&quot; and intermediate steps that grant a plausible non-gambling veneer (such as having to sell the card on eBay instead of just pocketing money, etc.)I never see kids using the machine at my local grocery store. I see adults, the same ones that patronize the CA lottery machine located next to the Pokemon machine, loitering while waiting for the next set of packs to &quot;unlock&quot; (they are on a timed release to manage the stock).It&#x27;s a depressing sight.

we have one of those by our office and it&#x27;s funny how every day it says sold out but there&#x27;s never really anyone there.one time we did walk up to it as a few unscrupulous looking guys were hanging out and we figured they&#x27;re just waiting for a restock. I don&#x27;t think those vending machines really do anything to prevent people from getting as much as they want.

&gt; was humourously-surprised to findI see. How would you describe the expression on your face, at this point in time? Perhaps, compared to one of the popular characters?

It&#x27;s kind of funny to see the Pokemon card vending machines at various grocery stores.Today I went to a hardware store, and was humourously-surprised to find a Pokemon card vending machine there too.

This is an awful take as beanie babies were always predicted to be collectors items but failed to reach that status.Pokemon cards, on the other hand, are veritable collectors items, like stamps or baseball cards.Like baseball cards, their value comes from a combination of rarity and nostalgia.

Yea that Charizard stopped being printed decades ago; however they have no problem printing cards that look identical to the originals other than a small logo, which many people get and feel no need to acquire the original Charizard. I don&#x27;t think demand in this case is nostalgia driven - it seems more likely that the heavy presence of scalpers making it difficult for average people to acquire product at MSRP has been causing the demand to skyrocket, in addition to celebrities like Jake Paul hype streaming.Printing supply is not infinite, theoretical or otherwise. They are printing as much as they can, and currently have a new factory scheduled for construction. Once the factory is online, the supply &amp; demand curve will almost certainly be affected. If it gets to a point where product is abundantly available at MSRP then suddenly the scalpers move to a different market to scalp and long lines of people camping in front of Target overnight dissipate. It will be interesting to see how the market dynamics change once the factory is complete.

Infinite theoretical printing supply. In reality, that specific really cool Charizard from my childhood stopped being printed decades ago, and natural wear and tear reduces the supply compared to 1999 (or whenever it was printed). Nostalgia kicks in, demand skyrockets. I don&#x27;t know why Pokemon specifically did this, but it&#x27;s far from the first trading card series to have this effect.As for utility: it&#x27;s still entertainment. remember that this is a TCG, so there technically is still a formatted game to play with these cards. Even if most effects in older cards have been long irrelevant in competitive formats, other TCG&#x27;s can have card prices surge due to new strategies being discovered.

&gt; it&#x27;s glorified cock fighting for kidsI never &quot;got&quot; Pokemon.The trainer is all lovey-dovey over their pets... NOW fight! One. At. A. Time.I kept wanting police to roll in with oversized nets and tranquilizer guns to break it all up.

Except very few of the cards that are so expensive are even used in the card game for real battles. And the shiny &#x2F; fancy ones have plain counterparts that would do the same thing in a battle.The value is purely artistic. Which is its own value, to be fair. But people aren&#x27;t buying these expensive cards to use them in the game. They just want them for the art (or simply the rarity)

&gt; without any utility or valid use case whatsoever.Pokemon battles have some amount of entertainment value.I mean sure, it&#x27;s glorified cock fighting for kids, but that doesn&#x27;t diminish the utility of the game as entertainment. It just makes it squishier.

Pokemon cards are today&#x27;s latest ponzi scheme and have an infinite printing supply without any utility or valid use case whatsoever.They are today&#x27;s beanie babies and is a complete waste of money. Even stablecoins have a better use case than this over inflated garbage.

Retired decorator's Pokémon cards sell for £1.5M