State of the Pokémon TCG
I find this situation increasingly baffling.
I realize that I started this entry with a sentence that looks like a title you’d see on a MoistCr1TiKaL video, but that’s genuinely how I feel. Why are none of the casual collectors in the Pokémon TCG scene complaining about the state of the hobby? Why are none of the actual players of the Pokémon TCG complaining about the state of the game they’re playing?
Let's take a step back and address the state of the Pokémon TCG. As of August 27th 2026, not a single retailer has any product up for sale that is in stock online for MSRP. It has been like this for over a year. Against my better judgement, I decided to stay awake with friends on a weekday night from 12am to 2am for a Target drop. When the clock strikes, we open the links and spam click as fast as possible to try to get our orders in. Most of us have the site open on mobile and desktop, just for an extra chance of success (rapidly tapping with our left hand on mobile and clicking our mouse with our right). Some of us are lucky enough to add the item into our carts after minutes of tireless spamming. Some of us are even able to get to the checkout screen. However, none of us are able to successfully place our orders. An error message saying, "The checkout is too busy, try again" plagues us for over 20 minutes as the product inevitably dwindles out of stock and into the hands of the scalpers who are using unbeatable bots.
No matter. I decided to sleep for 4 hours, wake up at 6am, and head to Target in person a couple minutes before opening. This will give me just enough time to get to work after I make my purchase. When I get there, there is already a line of about 45 people. The 15 people in the front are all sitting in fold-out chairs, meaning they've been here for quite some time. I decided to wait in line. They usher us in at 7am and give buyers a max of 2 of each item. The most coveted item, the Ascended Heroes tins, are gone after the first 30 people since they only had 60 in stock. I leave the store with 6 card packs from sets that I do not want. I still purchased them because I might have just shot my shit smoove off if I came out empty handed. I check Facebook Marketplace moments after leaving and see tens of listings of the product I wanted for over double the price.
What I learned from this is that, in this case, the only reliable way to receive a measly 8 packs from a highly coveted set, is to wake up at 4am on a workday morning and camp out in front of a store for 2 to 3 hours until opening. Folks. We are in Hellworld.
I understand that the cause of this is not a big secret. The state of this country is rapidly approaching the deepest pit of Dante’s inferno. The job market could be described as follows: As an educated, skilled, hard-working young adult, you are better off walking into a comically large vat of boiling slime and immediately ending your life than trying to job hunt for employment at a company that pays you a living wage. Therefore, there are plenty of people who go to extraordinary lengths to buy coveted plastic to resell for profit. Some even scale it up by paying for a subscription to botting services and order pallets of the stuff to their house. What about the employed people who do have a bit of extra money? Well, they can’t afford anything of actual value that can bring them joy like a home, a vehicle, or a gaming computer. So instead, they play into the hands of the scalpers by buying nostalgic overpriced Pokémon cards. This ecosystem is why it’s been over a year since product has been readily available for casual collectors.
Now, here's where we get to the part I do not understand.
At the most insignificant, minor, inconsequential inconvenience Pokémon fans yell and scream like behaviorally challenged infants. They spam social media accounts like a plague of locusts. A warring nation’s military force would pale in comparison to the sheer speed and volume of threats that these people send. Historically, this has caused enough damage for actual change to occur.
So… Why aren’t these people losing their minds online at the current state of the Pokémon TCG? I haven’t seen or heard of anyone spamming the social media accounts of the larger retailers about how their vibecoded bot-protection measures are unforgivably pathetic. I was expecting to see more posts that said something along the lines of, “Huge shout-out to Target for yet another drop that I had to stay awake until 2am for on a worknight only to be stuck on a broken checkout screen while millions of bots steal all the product!”
Why aren’t any of these people review-bombing their local card shops (LCSs) for selling at insultingly high prices? These stores get their product at distributor pricing. They are lying to you if they say that they pay a high price for their stock. The LCSs should not be selling at prices that make people’s skin crawl. Personally, I would gladly allow them to rip and tear through the boxes they sell to me in order to prove that I am not a reseller so that I can get the product at MSRP. Why aren’t more fans demanding their LCSs to implement such practices?
Perhaps most interesting of all, why are resellers online not facing a flood of threats and horrible messages? Would it not be reasonable to assume that thousands of Pokémon fans would be spamming the DMs of a seller on Ebay or Facebook Marketplace when they see products being sold for three times their value? Hell, why haven’t people started making bots that do the spamming for them? If botters can scalp product, surely vigilantes can spam the shit out of their DMs with the same technology?
Why are fans seemingly offering common courtesy to resellers? Why isn’t there more justifiable vitriol being slung at them? I’m not saying they should do so. I’m just surprised it isn’t happening. Even though the job market is nonexistent, I still see hiring signs all over retail. Surely a part-time job at Macy's pays multiple times as much as waking up at 4am to buy and resell 8 measly packs. Monetarily, it just doesn’t make any sense. I’d hate to sound like a boomer, but maybe there genuinely is a plague of lazy ass bums that would rather steal from kids and collectors to make enough to pay their child support than get their asses into retail or food service. I ain’t sayin those are glamorous jobs, but surely they’re more consistent and less morally reprehensible than roleplaying as a tertiary middleman.
I understand that it might take until the heat-death of the universe for The Pokémon Company to implement change, but surely with enough complaining we could patch things at a local level, even in a seemingly hopeless city like LA. Why can’t Pokémon fans do anything right? This is the one time you’re supposed to get mad you dumb motherfuckers. And stop buying from scalpers or else I’ll find you and send a truck through your bedroom window.
- Boblup