The Pokémon market is experiencing an unprecedented surge in the prices of rare cards. Cards that meet the fundamentals expressed by the old mantra: "Older, rarer, minter = Better."
This statement, popularized by the Pokémon collector smpratte, represents the objective features of a card that he looks for.
An older card was often printed less, has fewer surviving copies, and even less in good condition.
A rarer card has less copies to begin with. And…
A minter card elevates itself further through condition; another layer of rarity.
These properties are not subjective: They are the provable facts about a card that help define the difficulty of acquiring it.
The harder a card is to acquire, the more expensive it's likely to be.
But, for the past few years, these fundamentals seemed to be ignored by the market in favor of hype. Popular modern cards, like Pikachu with Grey Felt Hat achieved higher and higher prices despite being extremely easy to acquire. This is an example of:
A modern card,
Printed in enormous quantities,
Where 42% of all PSA graded examples have achieved the highest PSA 10 grade, making condition a nearly irrelevant differentiator.
Pikachu With Grey Felt Hat has nearly 120,000 graded copies at PSA alone with more than 50,000 PSA 10 examples. And still, PSA 10 graded Pikachu With Grey Felt Hat cards routinely sell for $3,500 while all manner of older and rarer PSA 10 cards sell for less.
PSA pop report for the Pikachu With Grey Felt Hat card, showing nearly 120,000 total graded examples and a PSA 10 pop exceeding 50,000.
To many collectors, myself included, this dynamic, which persisted for many years, felt off.
It turns out, the market just needed more time to rediscover card fundamentals.
Today, headlines are full of record sales for all kinds of rare cards. High-grade Gold Star cards are selling for $1,000,000 or more, and the Raincoat Pikachu now has a winning bid of just over $1,000,000 on Goldin. (The previous $8.4 million win on Fanatics Collect has disappeared from their sold search results, although the page is still live. My best guess is this means it has not yet been paid.)
Finally, it seems cards with true fundamentals are winning.
And the price gains for these rare cards have been enormous.
These price moves make sense if you think of the fundamentals as something like a coiled spring: It can stay coiled and dormant for a long time, but the moment it starts to attract demand the price movement can be sudden and explosive.
That’s because, for any truly rare card, the supply available for purchase at any given time will be extremely thin. Most copies that exist are likely stored away in someone’s collection already. A buyer therefore must:
Find someone who actually has a copy of the card (which can be very difficult when only 100 or fewer copies exist...)
And convince them to sell it, usually through offering significantly higher amounts than previous sales.
And, as prices for the card rise, the Price-Quality Heuristic (a cognitive bias that leads humans to believe higher priced objects are of higher quality) has a tendency to make even more collectors covet the card as it becomes more expensive, driving prices even higher still.
I can't say whether the market prices for these rare cards will go up or down from here, but in a world where Pikachu with Grey Felt hat can have a PSA pop report of 120,000 graded copies, where 40% grade a PSA 10, and that PSA 10 card sells for thousands of dollars...
It feels like high prices for truly rare cards are justified...
As usual,
Thanks so much for reading the TCG Buyers Club newsletter. My name's Grey, I buy cardboard, and I'm on a mission to make collecting and investing in Pokémon simple.
Cheers 🍻
P.S. I realize my newsletter, which releases every Tuesday, has been releasing every Wednesday. This isn’t my intention but maybe it’s my reality. At least you’re getting one newsletter a week as promised! By the way, in a couple weeks I will have published 104 weekly newsletters over the past 2 years. Crazy how time flies!!