Happy biiirthday dear The Pokémon TCGggg… Happy birthday to you! We now know exactly when the upcoming 30th Anniversary set 30th Celebration is getting its release, on September 16, with the first ever simultaneous global release for the card game. But I’m worried. This could be one of the greatest Pokémon TCG sets of all time, but that means the scalpers and resellers will be out in full force.
As the name suggests, 30th Celebration is supposed to be a celebration. If it’s scalped to hell and back, while that might be a good reflection of the state of the Pokémon TCG right now, it would certainly not be very festive.
For the Pokémon TCG, it seems as though scalping is bad for the brand image, but good for business, as it keeps demand ultra-high. But if this set in particular is impossible for real fans to buy at retail prices, snatched from them by resellers like seagulls mobbing a beachgoer for their fish and chips, it would be an especially bad look.
In recent years, Pokémon has taken some steps to try and curtail rampant reselling, but it remains a thorny problem to solve. What real defenses are there against scalpers? Here are all the methods I can thing of, in reverse order of effectiveness.
Online, you can enforce buy limits and deploy better countermeasures to combat botting. But this is a constant cyber war that there are no guarantees The Pokémon Company will be able to win. Those clankers be crafty.
You can make stores unseal products at point of purchase. That’s easiest at official Pokémon stores, but may be harder to work into the pipeline with distributors and large and small retailers. Plus, while removing the plastic packaging may deter scalpers when it’s done small scale, if this method is used enmasse, desperate fans might still buy from the resellers, sealed or not. At that point, all this tactic does is facilitate scammers.
You can just print, print, print and flood the market until you meet demand. This may have been the gameplan for the 25th anniversary set, and there’s signs it actually worked, as the chase cards from the original Celebrations set remained surprisingly affordable until quite recently.
I’m sure TPC will be making as much of this set as possible, but with the hype around Pokémon so high right now, they simply may not have the extra capacity to overprint a set, and TPC’s new manufacturing facility won’t be ready until 2027.
Finally, you can regulate purchases and buy limits more strictly by requiring some form of hard-to-fake ID. That’s what’s happening in Japan, where the company has just announced it’s beginning its new identity verification system with the Celebration set.
Setting a similar system up worldwide is likely to have loads of logistical, and perhaps even political, complications I’m not aware of, but I have to say, this does seem like overseas, at least, it’s going to work.
Whatever method of scalper-squashing TPC decides to deploy, I’ve got my fingers crossed it pays off. I really don’t want to be in that familiar situation where everything is sold out and I’m unable to get the cards, while eBay listings offer the set up to me at a 2000% markup.
Do you have any schemes for thwarting Pokémon’s scalper problem? Come and hatch them on the Wargamer Discord.
Source: Wargamer
