Late this week Logan Paul is opening a 1st Edition Base Set Booster Box. It’s going to bring a lot of eyeballs to his channel, and will absolutely make waves. I imagine we’ll see mainstream news outlets start picking up on the fact that he sold the packs for over a million dollars, explainers about why Pokémon is hot again, and probably 200 references to how everybody thought these things were going to go away like Beanie Babies. Perfectly aligned with the 25th Anniversary stuff, this is primed for an explosion.
When this happened last fall we saw an immediate spike in prices of nearly everything. You can see the effect in the below chart, taken from https://www.pokemonprice.com/. Their methodology looks at sales of PSA graded cards, so we’re talking premium collector price. Raw cards would be expected to follow these trends fairly closely, depending on condition, and largely they did.
I present this as an example of what I would consider a bubble-proof investment, but also one that I doubt is within the range of any modest collector. I’ve held the base set trio in my hands in shadowless form, but I am not holding my breath that I’d hold three 1st edition base set PSA 10s. These are the grails of the grails.
Let’s take a look at the Unlimited version of Base Set.
You can see the spike, which represents the Paul video bonanza, but for Base Set Unlimited it quickly corrected by about a 50% drop off the peak. In fact, for you technical analytics folks, you can see that the correction put the prices back on roughly the same trajectory it had been on since the pandemic-related increase started back in April. You could make the argument that these cards corrected back to their expected levels based on recent growth, and if you squint, the prices seem to be leveling off a bit (not growing as fast). Again, we’re talking PSA 10s here, but raw base set holos saw similar behavior.
Keep these trends in mind as we see the surge that the media attention will bring. If you have premium cards that you have been thinking of selling, you likely will find the hot market to do so. If you’re thinking of jumping in, especially for vintage cards, next week and into early March might not be the time to do it.
Vintage cards are just one part of the marketplace, however. The charts above have poor scale to see the more granular shift in prices over time, but you can see that cards had a bit of a soft peak in 2017 and then had a period of stagnation until the recent craze. When you talk to the old collectors, who were busy amassing amazing cards during that period for what we now consider super value, these are the times they long for.
But the modern sets during that period were largely overlooked, even derided by collectors. The glut of XY product was still obvious into last year, when blister packs would regularly hit Target with Steam Siege in them, for instance. Those get gobbled up immediately now, and if you see them in game stores who manage to get booster packs, they are charging 6 dollars or more a pack for them. My point is, these cards that were once set aside as uncollectable are now seeing an unprecedented increase in prices. The market for sealed product, in particular, seems to be unstoppable.
What I think will happen is we’ll see a bit of a correction. The glut of product that languished on shelves, I feel, was disproportionately picked up by speculators over the last year or so. Similar to that of the newest sets, where we are seeing demand being unfulfilled at MSRP because of artificial scarcity. Flippers are selling to flippers, essentially. What will it take for that bubble to pop and for these recently out of print ETBs and still in print Booster Boxes to see a correction in price?
When it happens, modern cards will be what take the brunt of that. The vintage market is well established and, for the most part, I think the scarcity of the cards are a function of actual supply, not centralized in a small percentage of speculators.
The big question then is when? Certainly not in the very, very near term. Logan Paul is about to drive things the other way for collectors, and we’ll see lower tier social media influencers follow suit. March will bring Battle Styles, which is shaping up to be a similar situation as recent releases; product will be hard to find at MSRP. I don’t think that set will be the tipping point, but we will continue to hear outcries from the community that is getting tired of the gouging. Over the next few weeks we’ll look a bit further into the future, taking a look at planned releases in 2021 and seeing if we can gauge things from what is happening in the Japanese sets. I think there are some tea leaves that can be read.
For now, buckle up. Pokémon is about to enjoy an amazing ride for the next couple of weeks!