I Collected Pokémon Cards as a Kid. The 30th Anniversary ETB Made Me Rethink the Hobby.

The 30th Anniversary should be exactly the kind of Pokémon release I get excited about.

I've known Pokémon for most of those 30 years. Now I have a young daughter, and something from my childhood has survived long enough that I can potentially introduce it to her.

So naturally, I wanted the 30th Anniversary ETB.

But instead of simply thinking about opening it and enjoying the cards, I found myself asking completely different questions.

Those are perfectly reasonable questions for a Pokémon collector today.

That's precisely what made me stop and think.

Here I was looking at a product celebrating 30 years of Pokémon, and much of my attention wasn't on the cards.

It was on scarcity, resale prices and FOMO.

And I realised I was participating in it too.

I don't think everyone who resells Pokémon cards is a scalper.

Secondary markets are essential to collecting. If I want a card from 20 years ago, somebody needs to be willing to sell it.

Card shops and dealers provide access and liquidity. Grading adds another dimension to collecting. Sealed collectors preserve products. Investors provide another source of demand.

There's room for all of them.

A healthy collecting ecosystem should have room for the child opening a booster pack, the player building a deck, the collector completing a set, the store making a profit and the person keeping an ETB sealed.

The problem begins when extracting financial value from that ecosystem starts making it significantly harder for everyone else to participate.

That's what bothers me about excessive scalping.

A scalper isn't simply betting that Pokémon will be more valuable in 20 years.

The immediate opportunity exists because someone else couldn't buy the product at retail.

The shortage is part of the opportunity.

Imagine a shop receives 100 Pokémon Elite Trainer Boxes.

There are 100 collectors who each want one.

Supply and genuine collector demand are almost perfectly balanced.

Now imagine resellers purchase 50 boxes immediately.

Only 50 remain for those 100 collectors.

The product sells out. Listings appear online above retail price.

Collectors start worrying.

Some pay the premium. Others decide that when the next restock happens, they'll buy immediately. Someone who originally wanted one might buy two because they're afraid there won't be another opportunity.

Resellers see the higher prices holding and buy again.

You get a cycle:

Scarcity → FOMO → more buying → more scarcity → higher resale prices.

The interesting part is that the number of actual collectors may not have changed very much.

Some of the additional "demand" is coming from people buying because they believe somebody else will pay more later.

And the product isn't necessarily genuinely scarce.

A vintage Pokémon card can become scarce because relatively few copies survive after decades of being played with, lost, damaged or kept in collections.

That's organic scarcity.

A newly released ETB can appear scarce because thousands of boxes have moved from retail shelves into cupboards, storage units and reseller inventories.

The boxes still exist.

You can still buy one.

You just have to pay more for it.

That's why I don't think scarcity itself is the problem. Pokémon needs scarcity. Finding something genuinely rare is part of what makes collecting exciting.

The problem is when artificial scarcity and FOMO start replacing the fun of collecting.

I felt it myself with the 30th Anniversary ETB.

Instead of asking:

"Do I want this?"

I was asking:

"What happens if I don't buy it now?"

That's a very different question.

Having a daughter makes me think about this differently.

She doesn't care what an ETB is worth on the secondary market.

She doesn't know which cards have low grading populations.

She certainly isn't calculating the expected value of opening booster packs.

If she likes a Pokémon, she'll probably like it because it's cute, funny or because something about it catches her attention.

Maybe her favourite card will be worth hundreds of dollars.

Maybe it will be a common worth 20 cents.

She won't care.

That's collecting in its purest form.

And it reminds me that the people most affected by an unhealthy collecting ecosystem may not be today's established collectors.

They may be the collectors who don't exist yet.

Experienced collectors know products may be restocked. We can buy singles. We know where to look and understand that an inflated launch price doesn't necessarily represent long-term value.

A parent who knows nothing about Pokémon doesn't.

Imagine their child asking for a particular Pokémon product.

The parent searches for it, discovers it is sold out at normal retailers and then finds the same product online for twice the price.

They're unlikely to think:

"I need to understand Pokémon TCG supply cycles."

They may simply think:

"That's ridiculous. Let's buy something else."

One lost collector doesn't matter much.

Thousands do.

Because some of those children would have become lifelong Pokémon fans, players and collectors.

Some might eventually introduce Pokémon to their own children.

That's how a collecting ecosystem survives.

There's an irony here.

People scalp Pokémon products because Pokémon cards are valuable.

But excessive speculation can damage one of the things supporting that value: a constantly renewing population of people who actually want Pokémon cards.

Every unopened ETB sitting in someone's cupboard is potentially future supply.

If enough collectors want those boxes in 10 or 20 years, that's fine.

But eventually someone has to actually want them.

Because scarcity by itself doesn't create value.

Scarcity plus demand creates value.

A rare collectible that nobody wants is still worth very little.

Pokémon's extraordinary advantage is that generations of people care about these characters.

Protecting that collector base may ultimately matter more to the hobby than making every new release immediately valuable.

There's nothing wrong with knowing what your cards are worth.

PokeGrade exists partly because I find that side of collecting fascinating too. I like identifying cards, understanding condition, grading them and knowing what they're worth.

Those things add another dimension to collecting.

But they shouldn't replace collecting itself.

If every Pokémon purchase starts with:

"How much can I sell this for?"

something important gets lost.

The Charizard you pulled as a child mattered before you knew its market price.

The battered card you carried everywhere might mean more to you than a pristine graded card worth hundreds of dollars.

Those emotional connections are what make collectibles different from financial assets.

Nobody remembers the day they opened an S&P 500 ETF with their friends.

We can't eliminate scalping.

Whenever something is desirable and supply is limited, somebody will try to profit from the difference between retail and market prices.

But collectors aren't powerless.

And there's another option that's easy to forget:

Collect something else.

Pokémon isn't the only trading card game.

If collecting Pokémon starts feeling more like competing with resellers than enjoying a hobby, you don't have to participate in every release.

There are other TCGs worth exploring.

Disney Lorcana offers recognisable characters and artwork for people who enjoy Disney.

Flesh and Blood has an interesting approach to separating some forms of collectible rarity from basic card availability.

Then there are Magic: The Gathering, One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Digimon, Gundam, Star Wars: Unlimited and many others.

None is completely immune to speculation or FOMO.

That's not the point.

We have a choice about where we spend our money and attention.

If a particular collecting ecosystem stops being enjoyable, collectors can spend elsewhere.

Competition for collectors is healthy too.

But don't leave Pokémon just to search for the next Pokémon before everyone else finds it.

That recreates exactly the same problem.

Find something you actually enjoy collecting.

And if you want to explore cards beyond Pokémon, that's one reason I point people to TCGdb.org — to make it easier to identify, research, grade and collect cards across different TCGs rather than feeling that card collecting has to begin and end with Pokémon.

Explore and grade cards from other TCGs at TCGdb.org.

This brings me back to the 30th Anniversary ETB.

I started out wondering whether I should buy it now, wait for a restock, pay the market price or worry about what it might be worth later.

I ended up asking myself a different question:

Is this really how I want to collect Pokémon?

One day, I'd like to sit down with my daughter and open trading card packs together.

Maybe they'll be Pokémon.

Maybe they'll be Lorcana.

Maybe they'll be a TCG that doesn't even exist yet.

Maybe she'll love collecting.

Maybe she'll lose interest after five minutes.

Maybe she'll decide her favourite card is a common worth 20 cents simply because she likes the character on it.

That's fine.

In fact, that's exactly the point.

I collected Pokémon when I was younger. Now I have the opportunity to share that experience with my daughter.

Hopefully, decades from now, her generation will have the opportunity to do the same.

For that to happen, trading cards don't just need valuable cards.

They need collectors.

So the next time a new product launches, perhaps we shouldn't just ask:

"Will this go up in value?"

We should also ask:

"Do I actually want to collect this?"

Buy what you love. Open some packs. Keep something sealed if that's what you enjoy. Try another TCG. Trade with other collectors. Help someone new get started.

And occasionally, leave a box on the shelf for the next person.

Because the kid who gets to open that box today may be worth far more to the future of the hobby than the person keeping 20 of them sealed to sell tomorrow.