The McDonald’s Pokémon crossover began on Tuesday, and already it looks like scalpers are on the prowl, securing whole boxes of these dragon-themed Pokémon cards and attempting to flip them on eBay at inflated prices. The thing is though, I think this time, the resellers have got it badly wrong.
I’m pretty sure we have a situation – much-needed in this time of Prismatic Evolutions panic – where scalpers will be left holding the bag. Even if I’m mistaken, you dear reader should definitely not, I repeat do NOT, buy these cards at a premium from online sellers.
The Pokémon card market has seen a massive surge over the past three months, and the newest Pokémon set is so hard to find that people are going to great lengths and paying absurd prices to secure it. So, naturally, now there are people trying to make money from any new product with a smiling red-cheeked, yellow-furred face on it, even one that comes with apple segments and nuggets.
But trust me, the only ones who are going to make money off the McDonald’s cards are the early birds, the ones who rush to market with a full collection or suspiciously sourced box of stock before people realize what a bad deal this is. They’ll mainly make their sales to other resellers, and I’m expecting it to be a game of musical chairs that ends with some scalpers getting burned as the music stops and prices plummet. That’ll be some lovely schadenfreude.
How can I be so confident these cards aren’t worth the prices people are putting them out for? Well there are three main reasons. Firstly, while we don’t know exactly how long the McDonald’s promotion will last, we do know that the fast food giant has more than 13,000 stores in the US, so there are going to be loads of these cards sold over the next month. Many people will have duplicates they want to get rid of, so it shouldn’t be hard to get a complete set without splashing out on week one.
Secondly, there is nothing desirable about these McDonalds cards. They’re not unique: all of them are reprints from older Pokémon sets. They’re not competitive: you won’t find any of the best Pokémon cards here. And they’re not pretty: there are no full art secret rares to collect. The only thing that marks these cards apart from the older reprints are the collector numbers, and that won’t be enough to have folks drooling over them.
Thirdly, we’ve seen this before. Pokémon cards have been sold within Happy Meals on separate occasions in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Looking on the secondary market, none of these cards are worth over a dollar now, and not a single one is worth more than five.
So please don’t buy into the hype. Take a second to look at some of the other great Pokémon packs you could spend your hard-earned cash on instead. And if you still really want these cards, go to your nearest McDonald’s, or just wait a few weeks for the prices to go down.
Meanwhile, we’ll be taking advantage of the less well-known part of this promo: some free Pokémon Pocket hourglasses, just in time for the next Pokémon TCG Pocket release: Space Time Smackdown.
For more, don’t miss our list of the most expensive rare Pokémon TCG cards, to see some collectibles that really are worth getting excited over. And you can find out about the coolest Pocket Monsters of all in our guide to Legendary Pokémon.
Source: Wargamer
