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Why Are Pokémon Card Prices Going Nuts?

Buyouts, yes. But there's more to it than that.

By Peter Day
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Published May 8, 2024
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15 min read
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Why Are Pokémon Card Prices Going Nuts?

After years of stretching its adorable paws to the sky, Umbreon has finally touched the moon. May 6 was the first time an ungraded alternate-art Umbreon VMAX card sold for over $1000 on TCGplayer.

Umbreon VMAX

Evolving Skies, Secret Rare
View on TCGplayer
Umbreon VMAX - Evolving Skies - pokemon

Umbreon VMAX

Evolving Skies
Holofoil
$917.14
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $923.39

Any layperson would wonder why a piece of cardboard is supposed to be worth a thousand dollars, and this time, even Poké Maniacs have to concede they have a point. Moonbreon has fluctuated between $400 and $700 for years. Why is this happening now?
The Pokémon Boom (That Never Ended)

When the prices of Pokémon cards surged in 2021, there was an easy explanation. The narrative goes something like this: the global pandemic and associated quarantines forced people inside for months, and shut off most of the traditional ways people spend their disposable income. At the same time, the government gave out stimulus checks to encourage spending. Those two factors led to a general boom in collectibles, which caught up with Pokémon cards around October 2020 when YouTube influencer and terrible human Logan Paul opened a 1st Edition Base Set Charizard on stream.

With a collective sigh, every 90s kid the world over remembered the Charizard card they'd had, or wished that they'd had, before the turn of the millennium. Now, for the first time, many of those millennials had jobs that paid them enough that they could afford a Pokémon card collection, and kids of their own who could appreciate it alongside them. So when 2021 rolled around and the Pokémon franchise began celebrating its 25th anniversary, the demand for Pokémon cards hit a fever pitch not seen since Peter Jennings was the anchor of World News Tonight.

Of course, nothing lasts forever. Over the next two years, quarantines were lifted, The Pokémon Company tripled card production, and the Pokémon market generally cooled off. While sales picked up again for Scarlet & Violet—151 (the nostalgia set to end all nostalgia sets), the market for Pokémon cards is much more relaxed now than at any point during 2021.

Rayquaza VMAX

Evolving Skies, Secret Rare
View on TCGplayer
Rayquaza VMAX - Evolving Skies - pokemon

Rayquaza VMAX

Evolving Skies
Holofoil
$458.28
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $455.92

Except, it's not. Many high-end Pokémon cards have hit all-time highs in 2024, including cards that were being chased back in 2021. And some of the price spikes are happening virtually overnight, with cards selling for twice as much one day as they did the day before. So what's going on?

The short answer, as many have suspected, is that cards are being bought out: buyers are purchasing multiple copies of these cards at once, presumably in an effort to make their prices spike so they can resell the cards at a higher price. But that's not the whole story. If every buyout was guaranteed to turn a profit, speculators would buy out every trading card all the time—and while some certainly try, they usually fail. Given the number of Pokémon cards being printed (9.7 billion in 2022), actually cornering the market on any of them is next to impossible. Even attempting to do so means gambling huge amounts of money on the premise that Pokémon fans will be willing to spend even more for their shiny cardboard than they already are. When they're right—when Pokémon fans are really willing to pay two or three times yesterday's Market Price—it means something strange is happening in the market.

It's no surprise that speculators are trying to buy out Pokémon cards. What's surprising is that, increasingly often, those buyouts are paying off.

To understand this strange phenomenon, let's go over some of the major reasons that the Pokémon market might be hotter right now than you might expect, and then look at some actual buyouts to see if we can understand why they're working.
It's Spring 2024, and People Still Want Pokémon Cards

The Pokémon market may be "cooler" now than it was in 2021, but that doesn't mean we're back where we were in 2019. Plenty of signs suggest that the demand for Pokémon cards is still massively elevated.

The most obvious sign is tournament attendance. In 2019, the biggest Pokémon tournament featured 1,122 players competing in the Masters division in the TCG. Today, the last four International tournaments all had well over 1,200 players, with the largest breaking 2,600. That record may get broken as early as next month, when players will descend on the North American International Championships, historically the largest tournament of the season. It may not be the soundest science to use player participation as a proxy for collector demand, but anecdotally, many of these new players pouring into the game picked it up because they started collecting cards in the last four years. The pandemic and 151 brought tons of people into the hobby, and many of them are sticking around. The only reason we aren't still suffering supply droughts is that The Pokémon Company has massively increased printing to meet that demand—but wherever weaknesses in the supply remain, the demand can find them.

The market has been especially volatile in the last few months for two other reasons. First, it's tax season in the land of the free and the home of the deliberately complicated filing system. Between late February and early May, millions of Americans who overpaid on income tax in 2023 received refunds from the government, and many have chosen to spend this lump sum on things that make them happy—including the Pokémon cards they've been eyeing all year. We've seen price increases in high-end collectible cards from other games like Lorcana and Magic over the past couple of months for the same reason.

Gilded Drake

Urza's Saga, rare
View on TCGplayer
Gilded Drake - Urza's Saga - magic

Gilded Drake

Urza's Saga
Normal
$256.40
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $256.40

Then on April 5, right in the middle of tax return season, Pokémon's Standard format rotated and most Pokémon cards printed in 2021 become illegal to play in major tournaments. In other games like Magic: The Gathering, Standard rotation generally causes cards to drop in value as the market gets flooded with players trying to offload their obsolete game pieces. This happened to some Pokémon cards, especially competitive staples like Battle VIP Pass, but rotation meant something different for the more collectible cards of 2021: The Pokémon Company was never going to print them again. As of April, any hopes for further waves of 2021 sets like Evolving Skies finally died, which meant the cards in those sets were ripe for speculation.

Miriam - 251/198

Market Price: $31.58
Chien-Pao ex - 261/193

Market Price: $28.33
Iron Hands ex - 248/182

Market Price: $29.32

There's one final trend worth observing: with the exception of Scarlet & Violet—151, the Scarlet & Violet Series hasn't been that exciting for collectors so far. While there are more beautiful full-art cards than ever, the vast majority of them feature Pokémon and characters from later generations (especially the oft-criticized Scarlet and Violet games) that nostalgic millennials aren't as familiar with. So fans who started collecting during the pandemic or came back for 151 have started looking elsewhere—often Japanese sets, and sets from the Sword & Shield Series.

All these factors have made the Pokémon market situationally volatile in the last couple of months. For the most part, The Pokémon Company has been able to outprint any lingering supply issues and keep prices stable, but wherever supply is weak, it hasn't taken much pressure from speculators for prices to rocket up again.

Which leads us to…
Buyouts, Buyouts, Buyouts

The theory behind buyouts is simple. All a speculator has to do is corner the market on a given card by buying as many copies as possible. This creates artificial scarcity, which makes the price of the card go up, and then they can resell the cards at a profit.

In practice, buyouts can and do often fail for a host of reasons, and end up costing speculators lots of money. The first is that they're extremely risk. If the card's price stays the same (or worse, dips down), then the speculator simply loses all the time and money it takes to re-sell their hoarded cards. This risk is multiplied by how costly and difficult it is to make a significant dent in the available supply of a given card. Then, even when a speculator effectively corners a card and sets the price two or three times higher than what they initially paid, they have to hope collectors will continue to buy at those prices, instead of buying any of the hundreds of thousands of other cards in the world instead.

Worst of all, if a speculator manages to clear all these obstacles and set off a price spike, the spike itself can ruin their plans by incentivizing collectors who already own the card to sell their copies, raising the effective supply and causing prices to drop back down to earth. Sometimes a speculator can sell into the bubble and get out before it pops, but if they're not careful, they can lose money on their own scheme.

For all these reasons, it's very hard to orchestrate a buyout that raises the value of a card long-term. When it works, there's usually some reason beyond the buyout itself for the card to go up in price. In those cases, fans will keep buying and/or hold their own copies as the price climbs up—arguably, to the card's "true" price.

Let's see how this looks in action, starting with a successful buyout.

Eon Hub

Fifth Dawn, rare
View on TCGplayer
Eon Hub - Fifth Dawn - magic

Eon Hub

Fifth Dawn
Normal
$6.52
Foil
$24.94
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $6.65

TCGplayer Infinite

Price history for Eon Hub, Jan 1 - May 7 2024. The bars show the relative number of copies sold per day, and the blue line shows the Market Price. The bar highlighted in red is May 1, when the average number of copies per buyer rose to 70.5.

This graph shows the market history for nonfoil Near Mint and Lightly Played copies of Eon Hub, a Magic: The Gathering card that was printed just once back in 2004. It's been just over $1 since the start of the year, but recently someone noticed that it's the best way to counter Obeka, Splitter of Seconds, the most popular new commander from Outlaws of Thunder Junction.

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The highlighted bar shows the day of the buyout. Over 20 times as many copies of Eon Hub sold that day compared to the average for the rest of the year. It's not visible on the graph, but the average number of copies per buyer rose to 70.5 that day, up from 1.0 most days in the rest of the year.

Most successful buyouts look like this. There's an external reason for the price to rise (in this case, the interaction with Obeka), and someone capitalizes on it with a truly massive purchase that pushes the copies sold and the copies per buyer to 20 or more times their normal daily values. Even with all those elements together, the price of Eon Hub is still starting to drop back down. When one or both of those elements are missing, a buyout usually fails all together.

Phoebe

Battle Styles, Ultra Rare
View on TCGplayer
Phoebe - Battle Styles - pokemon

Phoebe

Battle Styles
Holofoil
$12.79
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $12.81

TCGplayer Infinite

Price history for Near Mint copies of Phoebe 161, Jan 1 - May 7 2024. The bars show the relative number of copies sold per day, and the blue line shows the Market Price. The bar highlighted in red is Feb 20, when the average number of copies per buyer rose to 5.5.

As an example, here's the price history of Phoebe 161. On February 20, someone bought a ton of copies at once, and the average copies per buyer that day rose to 5.5. The card responded by continuing to drop in price. There wasn't an external reason for the card to spike, and the purchase wasn't enough to make a dent in its supply.

So far, so normal. Now let's look at some buyouts that bend the normal rules.

Dragonite V

Evolving Skies, Ultra Rare
View on TCGplayer
Dragonite V - Evolving Skies - pokemon

Dragonite V

Evolving Skies
Holofoil
$179.70
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $180.32

TCGplayer Infinite

Price history for Near Mint copies of Dragonite V 192, Jan 1 - May 7 2024. The bars show the relative number of copies sold per day, and the blue line shows the Market Price. The bar highlighted in red is Apr 12, when the average number of copies per buyer rose to 3.0.

As you can see, the Dragonite V buyout wasn't much more extreme than the Phoebe buyout. Most of the time, 3.0 copies per buyer doesn't qualify as a buyout at all—that's not even a playset per buyer. But this time, the surge in purchases caused Dragonite V's price to spike severely, and it's still trending up almost a month later.

The best explanation I can offer is that all the collectible cards from 2021 sets (especially Evolving Skies) were bound to go up once they fell out of print. You can actually see Dragonite V trending upward well before April 12. The soft buyout probably just accelerated the process.

Umbreon VMAX

Evolving Skies, Secret Rare
View on TCGplayer
Umbreon VMAX - Evolving Skies - pokemon

Umbreon VMAX

Evolving Skies
Holofoil
$917.14
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $923.39

TCGplayer Infinite

Price history for Near Mint copies of Umbreon VMAX 215, Jan 1 - May 7 2024. The bars show the relative number of copies sold per day, and the blue line shows the Market Price. The bar highlighted in red is May 1, when the average number of copies per buyer rose to 9.0.

Speaking of Evolving Skies, let's check out Umbreon VMAX. This time the upward trend before the buyout is even more visible, driven by several days of high sales with an average copies per buyer of 1.2. By the time someone bought out Moonbreon on May 1, it had already crossed the $700 threshold and was headed up. The last, tallest bar on May 6 doesn't look like a buyout at all—the average number of copies per buyer was back to 1.2, so that was most likely individual collectors trying to grab their copies before Moonbreon's price went even higher. Which, of course, pushed Moonbreon's price even higher.

Gengar VMAX

Fusion Strike, Secret Rare
View on TCGplayer
Gengar VMAX - Fusion Strike - pokemon

Gengar VMAX

Fusion Strike
Holofoil
$388.98
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $382.83

TCGplayer Infinite

Price history for Near Mint copies of Gengar VMAX 271, Jan 1 - May 7 2024. The bars show the relative number of copies sold per day, and the blue line shows the Market Price. The bar highlighted in red is May 1, when the average number of copies per buyer rose to 8.0.

Evolving Skies isn't the only set being targeted for speculation. Gengar VMAX 271 was trending up naturally too, before a soft buyout on April 6 (3.0 copies per buyer) drove it past $250, and a harder buyout on May 1 (8.0 copies per buyer) sent it even higher. On May 6 (2.0 copies per buyer), more folks jumped on the Gengar bandwagon.

Charizard V

Champion's Path, Secret Rare
View on TCGplayer
Charizard V - Champion's Path - pokemon

Charizard V

Champion's Path
Holofoil
$168.93
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $168.93

TCGplayer Infinite

Price history for Near Mint copies of Charizard V 79, Jan 1 - May 7 2024. The bars show the relative number of copies sold per day, and the blue line shows the Market Price. The bar highlighted in red is Apr 12, when the average number of copies per buyer rose to 8.0.

Older cards are getting bought out too, though the results are mixed. The buyout on Charizard V 79 (released in 2020) was much more severe compared to other buyouts we've looked at, but the results were milder, with just a $20 price increase and a no post-buyout rush. It's still out of print, so it's sensitive to buyouts, but compared to the cards that just rotated, it doesn't have as much room to grow.

Giratina V

Lost Origin, Ultra Rare
View on TCGplayer
Giratina V - Lost Origin - pokemon

Giratina V

Lost Origin
Holofoil
$472.54
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $469.88

TCGplayer Infinite

Price history for Near Mint copies of Giratina V 186, Jan 1 - May 7 2024. The bars show the relative number of copies sold per day, and the blue line shows the Market Price.

Now for something completely different: a card that's been rising without a buyout of any kind. Giratina V 186 released in 2022, so it hasn't rotated out of Standard. It also hasn't had any crazy sales days, and its copies per buyer hasn't risen above 2.5 all year, but it's still on track to double in price compared to where it was in January.

So much for the theory that all the spikes have been driven by rotation. Maybe this speaks to collectors' love for the later sets of the Sword & Shield Series, especially compared to recent Scarlet & Violet sets?

Of course, that hasn't stopped speculators from trying to buy out those sets too.

Morty's Conviction

Temporal Forces, Special Illustration Rare
View on TCGplayer
Morty's Conviction - Temporal Forces - pokemon

Morty's Conviction

Temporal Forces
Holofoil
$43.11
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $43.43

TCGplayer Infinite

Price history for Near Mint copies of Morty's Conviction 211, Jan 1 - May 7 2024. The bars show the relative number of copies sold per day, and the blue line shows the Market Price. The bar highlighted in red is Apr 10, when the average number of copies per buyer rose to 5.7.

On April 10 someone bought out Morty's Conviction 211 from Temporal Forces, the most recent Pokémon set, driving the total copies sold to higher than any day during release weekend, and pushing the copies per buyer to 5.7. Despite being a relatively weak buyout, it managed to double the card's price temporarily.

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Morty's Conviction has been trending back down ever since, but it's still shocking that this buyout worked at all. Temporal Forces is on store shelves right now, and it's never had supply problems. Why wasn't the market flooded with sellers trying to cash in on the hype and bidding each other to the floor? This isn't normal in a market when supply is plentiful.

Magikarp

Paldea Evolved, Illustration Rare
View on TCGplayer
Magikarp - Paldea Evolved - pokemon

Magikarp

Paldea Evolved
Holofoil
$105.73
Past 3 Months
items sold

Market Price: $107.19

TCGplayer Infinite

Price history for Near Mint copies of Magikarp 203, Jan 1 - May 7 2024. The bars show the relative number of copies sold per day, and the blue line shows the Market Price. The bar highlighted in red is Apr 3, when the average number of copies per buyer rose to 4.5.

Let's end on the most perplexing buyout of all. On April 3 there was a soft buyout of Magikarp 203 that pushed the $70 card to over $100, and it's just... stayed there. This card isn't even a year old, it shouldn't be possible for speculators to raise its price just by buying a fraction more than a playset each. But so far, the market has just calmly accepted that this Illustration Rare is the most valuable card in Paldea Evolved.
So... What's Going On?

I wish I could offer a clear explanation for every price spike and dip affecting the Pokémon market right now, but frankly, this is a weird time to be buying and selling Pokémon cards. All I can say for sure is that (as I hope I've shown), while buyouts are definitely involved in some of the price increases we've seen since January, the forces at play are much more complicated than a handful of fans playing stockbroker.

Best guess? Like the pandemic itself, the 2020's Pokémon boom still isn't over.

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