Comment by johnnyanmac
9 hours ago
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't know why Pokemon specifically did this, but it's far from the first trading card series to have this effect.
As for utility: it'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's can have card prices surge due to new strategies being discovered.
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'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 & 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.
> 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.
Those are definitely factors, but even the most influential celebrity can't sell a turd (see: the insane advertising push for NFT's). There has to be some value in the cards themselves for an influencer to multiply it, then that lack of supply from time makes it easy for scalpers to scalp.
>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.
Yup. I personally am fine satisfying my nostalgia with some later print edition that is $10 instead of $1000 for some "early print" version. I don't fully understand this value of "I must have the original print!", but that admittedly existed long long before we had social media campaigns to influence such desire.
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