The Collectibles Cycle is the basis of everything I do here.
Every four years since 2016, we've watched the cycle play out with remarkable consistency: a dormant Pokémon market, a boom, a correction, a new foundation, and then the cycle begins again. Google Trends shows this clearly: three unmistakable spikes in interest in 2016, 2020, and 2024 - each one followed by the same predictable sequence of events.
Google Trends data for the keyword pokemon card showing the spikes in interest associated with the boom phases of 2016, 2020, and 2024.
The question is: why has this pattern only been consistent since 2016?
Google Trends data for Pokémon, going back to 2004, shows the market was flat for over a decade. Interest was low, prices were low, and the hobby was quietly sustained by a small, devoted collector base. The Collectibles Cycle was always there in theory, but there was no boom to speak of.
Google Trends data for the keyword pokemon card going back to 2004, showing the long period of flat market interest in Pokémon cards prior to 2016.
Something changed around 2016. And I think the answer sits one level above Pokémon entirely.
Zooming Out
I've written about Stacked Hype before: the idea that multiple sub-categories of a collectible can be booming simultaneously, with a magnifying effect on prices. An example was the 2023 Japanese market: Japanese cards were booming, Scarlet & Violet era cards were booming, and waifu cards were booming - all at once. The result was extraordinary prices for cards like the Miriam SAR from Violet ex and the Iono SAR from Clay Burst - prices that have since collapsed by 80% or more as that stacked hype unwound.
Data from pokedata.io showing the massive highs for the Miriam SAR, and it’s long crash to today’s market low prices as the hype for it’s sub-categories died.
That framework works at the sub-category level. But you can run it in the other direction too.
Pokémon cards are a sub-category of trading cards. Trading cards are a sub-category of collectibles. And when you look at Google Trends data for both "trading cards" and "collecting" broadly, you see the same pattern: slow growth in interest over the past decade, with a notable acceleration in recent years.
Google Trends data for trading card since 2004, showing the long period of flat interest, followed by a recent spike.
Google Trends data for collecting since 2004, showing a long period of low interest, and the early signs of a spike starting in 2025.
This suggests something bigger may be at work. Not a quick 4-year cycle, but a long collectibles cycle for the critical parent category: collecting itself.
The Last Collecting Boom
The most recent long boom in collecting took place across the late 1980s and through the 1990s. This was the time of the junk wax era in sports cards — a period when sport card companies responded to massive demand by printing tens of billions of cards, only to flood the market with product that has been largely worthless ever since. It was also the era of Beanie Babies, comic book speculation, and, at the very end, Pokémon cards.
The driver of that boom was generational. Collectors who had grown up with baseball cards and comic books reached their adult earning years and began spending real money on nostalgia. Their collective spending created a rising tide that lifted all collectibles categories.
But every boom ends. By the early 2000s, the correction had wiped out the value of nearly every category that had surged. Even Pokémon, which has survived and thrived since, spent well over a decade in a deep dormant phase, supported by a small group of die-hards.
That was the last long dormant phase for "collecting" as a category.
The Long Dormant Phase highlighted within the Google Trends data for pokemon card.
The 2016 Resurgence
Although it took a while, 2016 appears to have marked the turning point for the popularity of collecting. The Pokémon GO boom helped new generation that had come of age, the Millennials, rediscover nostalgia. A new generation stared collecting again.
And, as their collections have grown in value, the cultural narrative in support of collecting has gained momentum all over again.
The 4-year Pokémon cycle, I'd argue, didn't start in 2016 just because of Pokémon GO. It started because a new generation starting collecting again. Pokémon was simply the first category positioned to catch it.
This doesn't change anything about the strategy: buy when boring, sell into hype, survive the correction, repeat.
But, if collecting is truly developing into a widespread cultural movement, it suggests that the long dormant phase is evolving into a long boom phase for collecting - a development that creates massive bullish momentum for Pokémon and the entire pop culture collecting ecosystem.
As usual,
Thank you 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. No livestream this week, but I’ll be back to discuss this and next week’s newsletter next week 🫡 Thanks again to everyone who has tuned in live, or checked the VOD afterwards.