If I had to choose one word to sum up the feeling in the Pokémon community right now, it would be Schadenfreude – the joy that comes from learning about another person’s misfortune, suffering, or failure. That might seem like cruelty from fans of a game about forging bonds with cartoon critters, but the misfortune that everyone is celebrating here is that of scalpers and resellers, who (apparently) were burned hard by 30th Celebration.
Scalpers did their usual nefarious thing with this set, buying up as many products as they possibly could from stores, with the plan to sell them on later to Pokémon fans desperate for their cardboard fix. But The Pokémon Company pulled out all the stops and created more product than usual for the anniversary set, tanking their value on the secondary market.
These packs are also believed to have exceptionally good pull rates, with rarer cards appearing way more often than usual, making even the best chase cards from 30th Celebration far less pricey than past sets. Scalpers’ dreams of profiting big from this set have gone up in flames. Ding dong, the witch is dead!
That’s the story anyhow, and there have been some spectacular rants from Discord servers and Reddit doing the rounds all over social media. One particularly infamous example by a user named Paul claims that TPC is “hurting the people that actually ensure their business makes money” and that they need to buy it all up themselves to save “countless small business owners like myself”. Hilarious!
Everyone, from mainstream news sites to the biggest YouTubers, is seizing on this story because it’s good content and everyone really wants it to be true, but I’m not convinced by this narrative. A few unconfirmed social media posts are not evidence that the bulk of scalpers have lost money over this release, and in fact I reckon that most will probably make their bucks back in the end.
After all, it’s not as though retail stores are replete with spare 30th Celebration ETBs; they are still selling out very swiftly. And right now in fact you can find these boxes selling on eBay for three times the retail price. Hardly something for scalpers to cry about.
Singles do seem to be a lot lower in price than usual, with many falling after release and the ‘Future Rare’ cards in particular barely beating $100 (I’m not shocked, they’re kind of hideous). But even that ignores plenty of other hits in the set, from big classic collection cards like Lugia, to the RGB Mews that are selling for thousands of dollars.
And let’s be honest, even if it was true that scalpers had lost big on 30th Celebration, unless this happened for multiple Pokémon sets in a row, it wouldn’t dissuade those trying to make money from it. Sorry to rain on your parade, everyone, but Pokémon’s true evil team isn’t beaten yet.
Source: Wargamer
