Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne discusses Pokémon TCG cards being used as financial assets.
Remember Logan Paul’s Pokémon card which sold for over $16 million (see “Most Expensive Trading Card Ever Sold“)? It went to AJ Scaramucci (son of Anthony Scaramucci), who calls himself a “venture collector“ and is a partner in the Treasure Trove website, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The website bills itself as “a holding company structured to hold and compound elite culturally-significant real-world collectibles.“ The company also spent $2 million in cash on a CGC 9.8 copy of Tales of Suspense #39 (first appearance of Iron Man) earlier this summer.
Like many other Pokémon collectors, Scaramucci became interested in collecting the cards during the pandemic, though he apparently had no interest in the game when he was younger. And, like many of today‘s collectors, he has no interest in playing the game, but sees cards, comics and other ephemera as artistic and cultural items he expects to grow in value over time.
Looking at the recent growth in value of Pokémon cards, he may well be right. The valuation of high-grade and vintage Pokémon cards has grown since 2004 by over 3400%, according to CardLadder. Compare that to the S&P 500 stock market index, which has grown by a mere 483% over the same time period.
The overall value of Pokémon cards has grown by 28% this year, compared to “only“ 13% by the S&P 500. Scaramucci says he has already turned down an offer of over $3 million for the Tales of Suspense #39 and though Treasure Trove has no plans to sell the comic or the Pikachu Illustrator card, he believes these sort of collectibles are vastly undervalued and expects the Pikachu Illustrator card (due to the same type of rarity as that of artworks by masters from the 18th and 19th centuries) to reach a valuation of $100 million sometime in the future.
Unlike Scaramucci, Peter Levin, co-founder of Griffin Gaming Partners, has collected Pokémon, sports cards, bobbleheads and comics since he was 4 years old, according to an interview in Fortune Magazine (this year was his 31st time at San Diego Comic Con). He has a deep love of these items but also views them as an investment vehicle. However, like Scaramucci, he has no plans to liquidate his collection anytime soon. Both men believe investing in these classes of collectibles differ from investments in things like cryptocurrency, NFTs and memecoins as, unlike those items, cards and comics are tangible assets and the average person knows what a Pokémon card or bobblehead is.
This concerns me because many of the buyers of collectible card games today focus on the collectable aspect and not the game aspect. We like to stream video related to the products we sell and while we can comparatively easily find videos of people playing Magic: The Gathering, Disney Lorcana and even Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG, almost all the videos that come up for Pokémon shows people opening packs and calculating the “actual“ versus “expected“ value of the box. Most of our Pokémon sales go to people who have never played and never plan to play the game and will only keep buying as long as they can find a customer. Eventually the market will run out of people willing to buy. What happens then?
Comments? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Source: ICV2
