Pokémon TCG: Sword and Shield—Brilliant Stars

Are Pokemon Cards In General Overpriced?

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It's the secondary market you're talking about. There's nothing wrong with working on supply and demand. Cards cost a lot when everybody wants them. People will be willing to pay a premium. If nobody was willing to cough up $50 for a card, the shop/seller in question wouldn't charge that price.

If you work within the primary market - that is, buying boosters/boxes/tins - and then trading (it IS a Trading Card Game, people), then you'll probably end up with what you need, cheaper or at the same price as you would pay for the singles, plus you'll have a bunch of other cards that you can use for other decks/future trading.

The singles market has always been a fairly expensive place to buy in when you're talking about popular cards. If you don't want to spend $30 and up for a Lux GL Lv. X, then...don't. There are other methods.
 
Offer- Demand my friends

some cards have the big posibility of becoming indeed expensive...
last time I talk with some other games friends, the general comments were the game is not moving (market), and is overpriced, not worth the effort to expend in a new game...

And the unfurtunate case of some particular cards that it may sound crazy but like in video games they only appear in certain regions, back in the EX era Rocket's Sneasel EX belongs to Yucatan and Blastoise EX was the most common Ex in Guadalajara, and so the list moves
 
a I agree with burnpsy to a degree.

YGO can be more expensive than pokemon, infact I'd say it is 90% of the time. It comes down to what you run, in any card game and where you buy from.

Pokemon in general will add up in the long run due to how it cycles compared to yugioh.

My best suggestion is to shop around and try to trade as much as possible. Carry popular un/common cards to help seal a deal if necessary.
 
I've seen $200 decks go 0-for a season, and I've seen a $45 deck win multiple CCs in this game (Torterrible). My greatest tournament win was with a deck that probably cost $20 all told (mostly in the Trainer engine).

Compared to a lot of other TCGs, Pokemon is relatively inexpensive. It's really quite amazing what you can do in this game with $100 and a little bit of ingenuity. Compare that to pretty much any other TCG on the market, and try building a competitive, borderline tourney winning, deck with just $100 and a bit of time. Difficult at best IMO.
 
To me, I don't find this overpriced. I usually do just one PR, and trade/win what else I need. I pay to enter tournaments as well, but I find that a good deal also to meet friends and have a good day out. I get alot of enjoyment from Pokemon, and I spend alot of time testing and playing. There are cheap competitive decks out there which can work on easy to get cards like Octillary and POP are trying to lower the cost by releasing Uxies and Claydols.

It may seem alot of pieces of card, but to many people it's a hobby the family can bond over, activities to do with friends, investments to win big prizes, adventures to go on ( Georgia Marathon, Worlds, Nats etc. )
 
Chairman Kaga said:
It's not inaccurate for a mint-grade card (which is essentially all Collector's Cache deals in).



It wasn't on the limited list originally. At its peak it approached $200.



You too.
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Erm, that was back at the time where if you didn't run that deck at a major tournament, you auto-lost. They limited nearly every single good card in the deck and killed it. Times have moved on.

As for prices being accurate/inaccurate, I have not found a single other reliable place other than where you linked that asks for that much for DAD, even the older ones barely go over $50 now. There are only 3 YGO cards that you can't find for under $100 to my knowledge. Judgment Dragon (deliberately made ridiculously rare), Dark End Dragon (6-10 in the world, recent major prize for Shonen Jump Championships), and Tyler the Great Warrior (2 in the world, thanks to Make-a-Wish Foundation). Everything else was reprinted for the sake of cutting it down, or banned.

@bullados: Look up "The Six Samurai" in YGO. Even the expensive builds don't go past $100. On top of that, it won a major tournament a while back.
 
I used to buy singles on-line (mostly promo cards) for the Lord of the Rings game (from Decipher)
those were about $25 each...

With Pokemon, since I mostly play for fun, I don't bother with those. I just buy the packs, and hope I get lucky.
Heck I might be able to trade for the cards that I need at league, so why would I buy them?

Think about it, why pay $40-50 for a single card, when you could buy at least half a box of boosters (and maybe pull one of the cards you need). Or pay a little more, and get an entire booster box, and have stuff to trade.
 
Out of the current "big three" card games (Pokemon, Magic, Yugioh), Pokemon is by far the least expensive. So deal with it, or don't play a TCG at all, I guess.
 
i don't think i've spent money on pokemon cards in a looong time. i mean, since most people already have the staples and stuff, you don't need to buy all the cyrus/roseannes and junk all over again, you'll already have it from the last deck. so in one go you might shell out like 150$ for a good deck, and then your pretty much set until two rotations away, and you can just trade the cards if you get bored of them. and if your lucky, you can TRADE cards and you can WIN cards.
 
I don't know why anyone would be complaining about this. Pokemon cards aren't that expensive and they just started making staples such as Uxie and Claydol available at league. They do make it cheep. Also about tins...... most of the money Pokemon makes is from random kids buying stuff from TRU or Walmart. So it makes more sense for them to put a card in the tin that they think will sell tins to them (random kids at TRU and such) then to competitive players. Charizard G lvl X is horrible but people like charizard. Plus they still want to make money off of us. How many people would buy boxes or packs when you could get luxray lvl X and stuff like that from a tin?
 
burnpsy said:
Both of these posts are inaccurate. saturn
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Sorry but back in my day of playing YGO, Chaos Sorcerer was a 10.00 card and a COMMON same with
Magician of Faith...lucky for you now the prices are dropping a little...just to point out to you.

I've seen Pokemon decks sold for 200$ - An SP deck at that...
 
The Dark Toxicroak said:
I don't know why anyone would be complaining about this.
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You made a lot of good points that I agree with, but this is my only beef with your post.

People are well within their rights to complain about it because - no matter which way you cut it - Pokemon cards are ABSURDLY overpriced! When you boil it down, $3.69 (plus tax) for ten pieces of cardboard and some pack wrapping is absolutely nuts. Can anybody say "markup"?

We all may have our disagreements, but I'd be surprised if someone _isn't_ at least a little concerned with this.
 
Well a better way that I should of put is that TPCi already seems to be dealing with this so there isn't much reason to complain.

Yeah but really you can make your money back pretty easily. Buy a pack for $3.69ish(plus tax) and you could get anything such as a level x that you could easily sell for tons of profit. The things that make card games expensive is rarity. They could alter the rarity so that everything has the same rarity which would be interesting. However I think this would make them lose a lot of money.

Someone told me there is a card game where you have to buy the whole set at a time. No rarity at all you just purchase the set and play. I am not sure which game or how that works really though.

Everything is overpriced mostly and people still buy it because you don't really have a choice.
 
Ninjask88 said:
Unless you read books as a hobby!!! But who does that?
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Umm, me? Books are expensive - especially if you're looking for something non-mainstream, but probably better value for money than the hobbies someone listed (DDR/ITG - wow, at least $3k, easy)

Cyrus said:
I'd be very curious to see how much it costs to produce a single booster pack, but even after manpower, materials, misc. business costs, etc factored in, they shouldn't cost more than $0.50.

And ya know, my graphic designer brother has predicted it to be less than that, but he can argue that point if he wants to...Lol.
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$0.50 would be way too high - listen to your BIL! Most of the cost of a booster is commission - the retailer, the wholesaler etc. etc.

saturn said:
If you think these are overpriced, look at Yugioh's stuff.
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Have you seen M:TG? OK, it's not in a standard format but do I have to mention this one, really? :rolleyes:

Oh, and obviously, collecting is a heck more expensive, especially if you're going for the rarest stuff.
 
dogma said:
Umm, me? Books are expensive - especially if you're looking for something non-mainstream, but probably better value for money than the hobbies someone listed (DDR/ITG - wow, at least $3k, easy)
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I Meant that because you could go to a library where it is free to rent books from there...

I geuss we all can't complain about cards being expensive if we buy them. It is just like if we have a bad meal and say 'This meal is horrible' but you still continue to eat it.
 
Cyrus said:
People are well within their rights to complain about it because - no matter which way you cut it - Pokemon cards are ABSURDLY overpriced! When you boil it down, $3.69 (plus tax) for ten pieces of cardboard and some pack wrapping is absolutely nuts. Can anybody say "markup"?
.
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I am tired of this ridiculous argument. It reminds me of the arguments people make about pharmaceuticals costing $1.18 a pill to make and selling for $10 a pill, ignoring all the research and development costs that must be paid for somehow.

First, tax goes to the State, not to TPCi; complain to your Congressman about your sales tax, not TPCi.
Second, the retail store sells the pack for $3.69 which they buy for $2.08, the $1.61 profit is theirs, not TPCI's. They make money on their comic books too; you'd be surprised how much.

TPCi sells multiple boxes for $75 each to retailers, so gets $2.08 per pack. The pack probably costs maybe $0.25 cents worth of raw materials. Then theres
- Salaries for TPCi employees. They get paid you know.
- toll manufacturing costs (or salaries and equiptment if you do it yourself)
- distribution costs (the boxes have to be shipped to the stores, they don't fly their on their own)
- cost of advertising. Have you seen all the posters, ads in magazines and on TV? They're not free.
- cost of sponsoring the POP premier event series from Battle Roads through Worlds.

I'm sure I'm missing lots of other costs as well. TPCi is privately held, so its not like I can look up their net margins, but I'd bet its more like 15-20% rather than the 400% or so that people like you imagine.
 
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FunnyBear, it's only a "ridiculous" argument if you're actually willing to pay that much. In addition, your analogy to pharmaceuticals is flawed because the only ailment that Pokemon cures is the pain in your soul.

I have a lot of pain in my soul broskie, but I'm not going to ease it with $3.69 booster packs.
 
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