For the past 12 months, the Pokémon Trading Card Game has been in turmoil. Back in January, I reported that the prices of individual cards had risen by roughly 150 percent, and since then the situation has continued to snowball.
Cards like the infamous Pikachu Van Gogh promotion are up 357 percent. Other high performers include Evolving Skies' Dragonite alternate art, which is up 243 percent, and Bubble Mew, which is up 384 percent. So many cards are now out of reach for the average collector.
At the time of writing, these cards cost around $600, $500, and $625, respectively.
This doesn't even factor in how difficult it is to buy closed products as supplies sell out instantly and crypto investors see the Pokemon TCG as their next big payday.
Much of the contention I've reported on so far has taken place in the English version of the TCG, so on a recent trip to Japan I decided to investigate whether there were similar struggles there – and alas, there are.
Visiting Pokemon TCG stores for research purposes…
My last trip to Japan was my third in 18 months. I've spent a good portion of each visit to the country browsing Pokémon card stores, and each time the problem has become more apparent.
During my first trip in April 2024, I could easily walk into one of Tokyo's many Pokemon Centers and buy booster boxes to my heart's content, and I did. There were no real limits and the only caveat was that the cashiers removed the plastic wrap from the boxes to prevent them from being resold. Good, because I tore them all apart as soon as I got back to the hotel.
It wasn't just sealed products that were plentiful. Every store I went to had cabinet after cabinet of shiny cardboard. There were new cards, old cards, cheap cards, expensive cards; there was a little bit of everything. It was a collector's dream.
September 2024 brought a slightly different picture. I was still able to comfortably buy sealed boxes from the Pokémon Center, but the boxes became a little more sparse during the six-month period between trips. People clearly understood that Pokemon cards were becoming more popular and valuable and were selling faster than stores could restock them.
However, this was nothing compared to my last trip. I excitedly rushed down to the Shibuya Pokémon Center on the first day. The Black Bolt and White Flare twin sets had been released a few months earlier, as had the Mega Symphonia and Mega Brave sets. I intended to buy a box of each to crack open in my jet-lagged state. Unfortunately, they had nothing. I could have bought one box of the unpopular Night Wanderer set, released a year and a half earlier, or a few boxes of Cyber Judge, released in January 2024, but that was all the available stock.
During my trip, I visited two other Pokémon Center stores in Tokyo, both of which were the same.
This meant that the Pokemon itself had no stock of the previous one seven extension. The only remaining evidence of stock was signs instructing collectors of purchase limits for each set, with giant “sold out” stickers.
So I decided to scratch my Pokemon itch by visiting a few independent stores and sure enough they had the last sets in stock. The problem is none of them were selling them at RRP.
The typical RRP for a Japanese booster box is ¥5,500 ($36), of the four most recent sets Black Bolt was around ¥12,000 ($79), White Flare, ¥11,000 ($72), Mega Symphonia, ¥9,000 ($59), and Mega Brave, ¥00,00 ($72). Almost every expansion sold for double the RRP.
This extended to sets further back as well. Glory of Team Rocket, Battle Partners, and Heat Wave Arena sold for roughly the same price. I couldn't buy a box from one of the many Pokemon TCG expansions in 2025 for anything close to retail price.
I happened to be in Japan when the latest set, Inferno X, came out, and since it's focused on Charizard, not much needs to be said. The boxes were more than ¥16,000 ($105).
In fact, things have gotten so bad that one store I visited has restricted the sale of coveted Pokémon TCG products to children under 15. Heartwarming stuff, but a damning indictment of how unsavory characters dominate the scene.
Unfortunately, the card display cases were not a pretty sight either. While other TCGs had an abundance of cards, the Pokémon TCG sections were barren. What was once an eclectic selection of cards from different generations was now a hodgepodge of every card the store could put together without an immediate sale.
Last September I noted how individual cards weren't doing great, but the state of the stores 12 months later epitomized the global issues facing the Pokemon TCG at the moment.
A harsh reality, as the shop owner said
Much of the earlier part of this report is very anecdotal. Sure, there were stock issues, but I'm just a single consumer and I ended up leaving at a really bad time. So I decided to contact one of the stores I visited during my recent trip to find out how deep these problems go.
D-Cent game&card is an independently operated TCG store in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo. It specializes in almost all the major TCGs and like many card shops in Japan has an area for customers to play against each other. They tell me that “the Pokemon TCG has definitely been on the rise lately” and that as a store they've faced “frequent sales and limited supplies.”
As a store, D-Cent says “it's getting harder and harder to get products” and like any other card store, “they tend to sell items at prices higher than normal retail.”
While stock issues are one thing, D-Cent has seen a change in the type of consumer that visits the store. Typically, TCG players are more prominent than collectors in Japan, but that seems to be shifting. “Cards that are likely to be displayed or collected tend to sell more than those used for actual play, and this trend is increasing,” they say.
When I asked D-Cent about the empty cabinets that were common at all TCG retailers in Japan, they said that “a lot of people still sell their cards to stores” and that it's more a case of demand outweighing supply.
Wherever you are in the world, the Pokemon TCG seems to be a problem. While the new Pokémon Center bot protections help ease the launch day woes, stock issues still persist and cards keep getting more expensive. Aside from printing every expansion into the ground and completely trashing the TCG, The Pokemon Company is running out of ways to keep collectors happy.
- Original release date
-
October 20, 1996
- Number of players
-
2
- Age recommendation
-
6+
- Length per game
-
Variable
- Franchise name
-
Pokemon
