Now Is the Best Time to Invest in Pokémon Cards

Pokémon united a generation. 25 years later, it's an exciting time for collectors and investors alike, and the trend is set to continue.

To Be The Very Best

I’m a “millennial,” and I love Pokémon. And I’m not unique. Like most millennials, I grew up in the 90s, I listened to Hanson and the Backstreet Boys, and I collected Pokémon cards. And also like most millennials hitting my 30s, I’m also getting very nostalgic about the 90s. As times get more stressful and more complicated, pogs, slime, and Rocket Power start to fill my dreams. Even more present (and currently relevant) than any of those, however, is Pokémon. For someone who didn’t grow up during the phenomenon, Pokémon was (and is) one of our generation’s greatest shared experiences. Blood and sweat, but mostly tears, were shed trading Pokémon cards and making deals on thousands of playgrounds across the world. Deeply-set memories were formed as we, our friends, and our siblings learned –and shared– the world of Pokémon together. Pokémon fever in the 90s was one hell of it a time to be alive.

At its core, Pokémon is and always has been a social experience. There’s an excellent video by KingK that describes this in detail. The original games for Gameboy that kicked off the craze were designed explicitly with this social experience in mind. For example, the first game was not just one game, but two: Pokémon Red, and Pokémon Blue (originally Red and Green, in Japan – Blue was released later, and Green was never released in the US.)

For the most part, both Red and Blue were identical, with an exception: not all Pokémon could be found in each. There were 11 Pokémon in each game that couldn’t be caught in the other. And therein lies the genius of Pokémon.

With a cynical 2020 mind, one might think that it was designed this way to encourage kids to get both games in order to get all the Pokémon. And while profit is certainly a requirement of any business, it wasn’t about profit, at least not directly - it was about creating a memorable experience.

Instead of being a solitary endeavor, the secret sauce of Pokémon was that it encouraged kids everywhere to share the experience. There’s only one way to become the best, and that’s by working together. Your friend who got Pokémon Blue might come to school and tell you about the Vulpix he just caught, and how after some intense battles, it evolved into a Ninetails.

“Vulpix, Ninetails?! I’ve never even heard of those!” you’d think to yourself.

And you’d be right, because in order to get them, you’d have had to trade with someone who can find them in Pokémon Blue. And you’d also be in luck, because chances are your friend doesn’t have the Growlithe or Arcanine that only you could get in Pokémon Red:

So you’d discover new Pokémon together, trade them, and you’d talk about what you learned as you progressed through the game.

It’s difficult to understand if you don’t grow up with it, but the real magic of Pokémon was that it was a powerful shared social experience on an unprecedented scale.

Enter: Pokémon Cards

So, through all of this - where do Pokémon trading cards fit in? To put it simply, they extended the experience. For the first few months, all kids had was the Gameboy games. While the pixel art was excellent given the limitations of the technology, these pixel sprites were all we had to help us imagine these powerful and mystical monsters:

So when Pokémon cards started showing up on playgrounds, and they looked like this:

We were awe-struck. So awe-struck, in fact, researchers found that Pokémon left a permanent imprint on our brains.

To top it all off, the Pokémon TV Show (Pokemon: Indigo League) hit screens everywhere. The main protagonist was a relatable, endlessly-positive kid (named Ash Ketchum). Ash was 10 years old, same age as you if you were born in 1990, and he was setting out on his own adventure to become the world’s best Pokémon trainer. Pokémon is all about optimism, positivity, and self-reliance. Everyone in our generation knows the Pokémon theme song. It just makes you feel good.

And that was our whole generation, all sharing and living that dream, together. It was the perfect storm.

Two decades later, millennials are entering their mid-adulthood, getting jobs, and enjoying what comes with: disposable income. And like I’d mentioned earlier, as the world gets more chaotic and we have more responsibility in life, we’re getting extremely nostalgic for simpler times.

Pair that with the fact that, almost 25 years later, and Pokémon is the currently the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, is still extremely relevant and producing phenomenons in the this decade, and new Pokémon card sets are selling off the shelves to this day. Pokémon is here to stay.

Why Pokémon?

This is one of the first questions that came across my mind when I started collecting Pokémon cards as an adult, and any reasonable adult careful with their money should be asking the same. Why didn’t other things from the same era take off, most notably, Beanie Babies – what happened to them?

There’s a really great book about this by Zac Bissonnette called The Beanie Baby Bubble. The main reason: while not insignificant, the organic interest generated by kids who had real fun collecting and playing with Beanie Babies was outweighed by short-term demand driven by adults who lined up and bought out Beanie Baby stock either to resell during the craze or hold as an investment for the future, not by the actual kids playing with them. A huge slice of the demand was artificial. And hello demand, meet supply. Ty produced more and more Beanie Babies until that demand was met, until hundreds of thousands of Beanie Babies were just being sat on. The market became saturated, and it became clear there was no longer any true scarcity.

Pokémon cards progressed differently. In order to meet demand but also create an excitement around scarcity and rarity, Wizards of the Coast, who produced the first Pokémon cards, released them in limited sets. Each set produced by Wizards of the Coast had a limited run of cards marked with a 1st Edition stamp, and another larger, but still limited, run of cards without. The first set to be released under this structure would be called “Base Set 1st Edition” and “Base Set Unlimited”. It’s estimated that the 1st Edition print run is about 1/8th the size of the “Unlimited” run. But both were fairly allocated, right from the get-go. And when the set sold out, it was gone: they were onto a new set.

I started collecting as an adult in late 2018.

Outline

1. Introduction / What Pokémon was / Why it was important

2. Social experience / cards were the first depiction of the video games and brought it to life

3. Pokémon TV Show

4. Organic interest vs investor mindset (why Beanie Babies failed)

5. Size of market

6. Timing (Millennials entering market, pay, income, inheritance, COVID)