For the last 12 months, the Pokemon Trading Card Game has been in turmoil. Back in January, I reported that prices of individual cards had risen by around 150 percent, and matters have continued to snowball since then.
Cards like the infamous Pikachu Van Gogh promo have increased by 357 percent. Other high risers include the Dragonite alternate art from Evolving Skies, which is up by 243 percent, and the Bubble Mew, which has risen by 384 percent. So many cards are now unobtainable to the regular collector.
At the time of writing, these cards cost around $600, $500, and $625, respectively.
That doesn’t factor in just how difficult it is to buy sealed products, either, with stock selling out instantly and crypto investors seeing the Pokemon TCG as their next big payday.
Much of the strife I’ve reported so far has been on the English-language version of the TCG, so on a recent trip to Japan, I decided to investigate whether there are similar struggles there —and, unfortunately, there are.
Visiting Pokemon TCG Shops For Research Purposes…
My most recent trip to Japan was my third in 18 months. I spent a fair portion of each visit to the country browsing its array of trading card shops for Pokemon cards, and each time, the problem became more apparent.
During my first trip in April 2024, I could comfortably walk into one of Tokyo’s many Pokemon Centers and buy booster boxes to my heart’s desire, and that I did. There were no real limits, and the only caveat was that the cashiers removed the plastic wrapping from the boxes to stop them from being resold. Fine by me, as I ripped them all as soon as I got back to the hotel.
It wasn’t only sealed products that were abundant, either. Every store I went to had cabinet upon cabinet of shiny cardboard. There were new cards, vintage cards, cheap cards, expensive cards; there was a little bit of everything. It was a collector’s dream.
September 2024 painted a slightly different picture. I could still comfortably buy sealed boxes from Pokemon Centers, but in the six-month period between trips, cabinets had become slightly more sparse. People had clearly latched onto the fact that Pokemon cards were becoming more popular, and more valuable, and they were selling faster than stores could replenish them.
That was nothing compared to my most recent trip, though. Excitedly, on my first day, I rushed down to the Shibuya Pokemon Center. The Black Bolt and White Flare dual sets had been released a few months prior, as had the Mega Symphonia and Mega Brave sets. I had the intention of buying a box of each to open in my jet-lagged state. Unfortunately, they had nothing. I could buy a single 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 stock available.
During my trip, I visited two more of Tokyo’s Pokemon Center stores, both of which were the same.
This meant that Pokemon itself had no stock of the previous seven expansions. The only remaining proof of stock were signs instructing collectors on purchase limits for each set, with giant ‘sold out’ stickers over them.
I decided, then, to scratch my Pokemon itch by visiting some independent stores, and sure enough, they had stock of recent sets. The problem is that none of them were selling them at RRP.
Typical RRP for a Japanese booster box is ¥5500 ($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, ¥12,000 ($79). Almost every expansion was selling for double the RRP.
This extended to sets further back, too. Glory of Team Rocket, Battle Partners, and Heat Wave Arena were all selling for roughly the same. I couldn’t buy a box from one of 2025’s many Pokemon TCG expansions for anything close to retail price.
I happened to be in Japan when the latest set, Inferno X, was released, and given that it’s focused on Charizard, not much needs to be said. Boxes were upwards of ¥16,000 ($105).
Things had gotten so bad, in fact, that one store I visited restricted the sale of in-demand Pokemon TCG products to children under the age of 15. A heart-warming thing to do, but a damning indictment of how the scene is being dominated by unsavory characters.
Unfortunately, the display cases of cards weren’t a pretty sight either. While other TCGs had cards in abundance, the Pokemon TCG sections were barren. What was once an eclectic selection of cards from across the generations was now a hodgepodge of whatever cards a shop could scramble together without selling immediately.
I noted how things weren’t great for single cards last September, but the state of stores 12 months later epitomised the global issues the Pokemon TCG is currently facing.
The Harsh Reality As Told By A Store Owner
Much of the previous section of this report is all highly anecdotal. Sure, there were stock issues, but I’m just a single consumer and I could have ultimately just gone at a really bad time. So I decided to get in contact with one of the stores I visited during my recent trip to find out just how deep these issues run.
D-Cent game&card is an independently run TCG shop in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo. It specialises in almost every major TCG, and like many card shops in Japan, has an area for customers to play against each other. They tell me that “the popularity of the Pokemon TCG has definitely been rising recently,” and that as a store, they’ve faced “frequent sell-outs and limited stock.”
As a store, D-Cent says that “it has become more difficult to obtain products,” and, like every other card shop, they “tend to sell items at prices higher than the regular retail price”.
While the stock issues are one thing, D-Cent has noticed a change in the type of consumer that is visiting the store. Typically, TCG players are more prominent than collectors in Japan, but that seems to be shifting. “Cards that are likely intended for display or collection tend to sell more than those used for actual gameplay, and this trend has been increasing,” they say.
When I asked D-Cent about the empty cabinets that were commonplace throughout every TCG retailer in Japan, they say that “many people are still selling their cards to stores,” and that it’s more of a case that the demand is outweighing the supply.
Wherever you are in the world, it seems the Pokemon TCG is an issue. While the Pokemon Center’s new bot protections are helping ease the launch day woes, stock issues still persist and cards are getting pricier. Short of printing each expansion into the ground and devaluing the TCG entirely, The Pokemon Company is running out of options to keep collectors happy.
- Original Release Date
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October 20, 1996
- Player Count
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2
- Age Recommendation
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6+
- Length per Game
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Variable
- Franchise Name
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Pokemon
