At 8 AM on January 17th, a Friday morning, a friend of mine and his little boy were in line outside a toy superstore for the release of the new Pokémon Trading Card Game set, themed around Eevee and the eight ‘Eeveelutions’; Prismatic Evolutions. The hype for this set had been massive and no one was naïve enough to think that it was going to be as easy to get hold of as every other set in recent times. Saying that, I’m not sure he thought there would be a line of 30-something year olds already there and waiting for them when they arrived. After queuing up and entering the shop, everyone raced to the Pokémon section, and my friend and his son (4) were confronted with a scene from every great villain’s origin story – the last box of ‘product’ being held aloft by a grown man with a triumphant grin on his face. Tears, tantrums and more tears (from my friend) but ultimately, no Prismatic Evolutions.
This has become a familiar scene in the territories covered by The Pokémon Company International and is part of a turbo-charged phase of hype in the card game’s life cycle. It’s also a scene that has lately involved physical violence, at least in the United States and Canada. The scarcity of product and perceived investment value is driving collectors to ever greater lengths and is also introducing a new subset of purchasers who I am calling “Scalper Bros” (more later). While the TCG has been growing healthily over the last couple of years, the release of Prismatic has been something of a different order of magnitude. I am still a relative beginner with only 18 months of play under my belt, but I have seen the game go from something that provokes a, “What’s that?” to one that invites the phrase, “Oh, yeah I saw two guys beating seven bells out of each other on TikTok over a Charizard.”
So, why? I think the ultimate draw of the game and product is the quality of the Pokémon IP itself. Instantly recognisable, fun and colourful, different in look and feel from many Western IPs and something that many of us grew up with to some degree (or our kids have). Once you start to look at what’s driving the current explosion, it gets a bit more tricky, and it’s worth looking at what the game is and why it is so enduringly popular. The game fundamentals are more or less unchanged from its release almost 30 years ago: The players make a 60 card deck, work out who’s going first then put Pokémon down on the table and set aside prize cards. They then take turns to draw cards, use various abilities, attach energy cards to power up attacks and knock each other out. When someone takes enough prize cards or knocks out all the opposing Pokémon, they win. (I’m leaving out all the irregular win conditions here for brevity, before any Snorlax Stall or Great Tusk Mill gamers start sharpening their pitchforks). Do that in a best of one or best of three format and that’s it, reduced down to a Spicy Seasoned Curry sauce. Products range from single packs of ten random cards to elaborate collector’s boxes with play mats and dice. The simplicity of these mechanics gets you in and gets you hooked, and then over the following months the intricacies reveal themselves, and you find yourself pricing up flights to New Orleans from London for a tournament…
This isn’t an exaggeration, by the way. My wife and I thought it would be a laugh to take a ‘Battle Academy’ set which teaches you how to play the game on a trip to visit my little nephew. He lost interest after an hour or so but we just… never stopped playing. We got back home and looked up where we could play with other humans, stunned to discover a thriving scene in London with multiple card shops and gaming bars. We pitched up at one with our home-brew decks and got soundly battered by the cheerful locals. One of the old sweats saw some newbies and set us on a good path with some really simple deck building principles and letting us know where we could play regularly in a semi-serious league. We couldn’t believe how friendly people were and just how much fun everyone was having. The variance inherent to the game produces some stunning results for new players and keeps the veterans on their toes. Great players with great decks will always do well, but Pokémon retains a thrilling element of chance that means from time to time you can really surprise yourself and challenge the top tables. I’ve had my smartwatch warn me about my heart rate a couple of times after playing my Electric Generator and hoping I hit two lightning energies to win the game (I didn’t). The hobby has a great community of all ages and we have made some friends for life. And maybe a couple of new enemies I wasn’t expecting, but that’s a reflection of my own personality rather than a comment on the game.
Pun-klaxon: In order to keep things fresh, the Pokémon TCG is always evolving. At time of writing there are roughly 2,500 Pokémon and Trainer cards currently legal for tournament play. The Trainer cards are what you need to find Pokémon in your deck, mess with your opponent’s hand of cards, power up your guys, power down their guys and develop your strategies to win. New cards are released every few months, and once a year a great cull takes place called ‘Rotation.’ Looked forward to by some and feared by others, it is inevitable. Much of this 2,500 card total will be reprints from different sets or will be increasingly rare artwork cards with intricate designs or holographic patterns. These naturally command a higher price on the resale market.
Herein lies part of the explanation for the recent explosion. The Prismatic Evolutions ‘Secret Illustration Rares’ are simply beautiful. Creatures Inc, co-owners of the Pokémon brand, commission the card artwork and are responsible for game design. They have clearly thrown the kitchen sink at this set and have produced something special. They have taken Eevee, a historically popular Pokémon, and designed a set which gathers around this beloved character a gallery of some of their most elaborate and colourful designs by hugely talented artists like Yashiro Nanaco. It might seem like hyperbole to a normal person who doesn’t lose sleep over trying to play two Arven cards in a turn, but these cards are stunning works of art with rich colours and holographic textures which follow the lines of graphics and designs and catch the light in different ways. I need to take a moment to have a good look at my life after writing that sentence but I think ultimately I will stand by it. They are really nice cards.
And people want them! Wanting things makes them valuable, and that means that people will want to sell them to you for way too much money. Here come the Scalper Bros. They’re a newer breed of buyer; very online, very willing to fight tooth and nail to secure product, very ignorant of the actual game. They will hoard product, use bots to insta-buy all of a website’s available stock and then gloat about their hauls online. There have always been those who buy product and resell at a markup, it’s an established part of the scene and is valuable to those of us who don’t buy packs to collect or complete sets but instead want to compete. For example, I always buy a nice art card at each big tournament as a memento of the day, and I’m very partial to vintage energy cards. It’s also how a lot of card shops make a significant part of their income, whether online or in store. But they don’t buy everything, and they don’t buy rubbish. I have seen videos of people waiting for product to be put out on shelves and immediately grabbing all of it; people buying every single item available in a TCG vending machine, people filming themselves in a scrum trying to get hold of product while calling it the wrong name, clearly with no idea of what they are buying or why.
They just know they need it so they can get that ‘God Pack’; an extremely rare pack that contains one of each of the new Eeveelutions found at an estimated rate of 1 in 2,000 packs. Something that you can sell for a tidy sum, to be sure, but not something that will change your life. What we are seeing now is the hype of a desirable set warped by zero-attention span TikTok creators trying to generate traffic plugging the next big way to totally maximise your investment BRO I mean people are SLEEPING on this set and you NEED to get on this before it’s too late. The adjacency to cryptocurrency pump-and-dump or NFT bubble language is eerie. This isn’t to say that if you manage to make £1,000 from selling one card then you haven’t done well, but to describe these cards as investments in any real sense is risky at best. TPCI can choose to reprint a set whenever they like, affecting any and all card values. Crying four-year-olds and grown men coming to blows in American parking lots is not what most brands would call positive passive marketing.
I would argue that TPCI also have the real card game to consider; if kids can’t affordably get hold of cards to play with then they won’t want to play the game. They will move on to the next thing fighting for their attention. The big events may well be loss-leaders for the company but the game is the beating heart of this thing. Many competitive players are more interested in the metagame than whether the graphic is perfectly centred on their latest card. Azul Garcia Griego, the closest thing the game has to a universall- known celebrity, plays minimum-rarity cards in his decks. Overall, this should mean that as long as people can get hold of the cards they need to stay plugged into a constantly shifting meta the game can continue to weather these occasional descents into over-buying. There was also a counter-point made recently by Andrew Mahone, a content creator and streamer, that the hype and scarcity generates a bit of the excitement that he felt as a kid in the late 90s and early aughts buying cards. I can see the argument here and I’ve felt on a couple of occasions following a binge of pack opening that I was indulging in a bit of over-consumption. You can have too much of a good thing. These products are also not essentials, they are a luxury that those of us with disposable income are lucky enough to access (most of the time). No one has a right to Pokémon cards, or indeed a right not to be charged an arm and a leg for them. As long as retailers are sticking (broadly) to normal pricing I think many of us can tolerate a brief surge, it is better after all that the card shops and venues that we love are able to keep the wolf from the door. Ultimately these scalpers thrive because people are willing to pay their exorbitant prices; if we collectively choose not to do so we cut them off at the knees.
Many of us think/hope that the hype will subside in the coming months, no fad lasts forever and these days the cycles seem even shorter. It has occurred to me that any potential reprint might also have the unintended consequence of igniting Prismatic Evolutions Car Park Deathmatch II: Electric Boogaloo. I am, however, hopeful that it means the rest of us can just get our hands on some cards that we can enjoy playing with or collecting (and I get the God Pack this time).
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