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.
Wait, I can get a competitive Pokemon deck for the same price as a competitive Pauper MTG deck?
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.