It might sound a little silly that there’s an entire subgenre of influencers who offer investment advice around Pokémon trading cards. Probably because it is a little silly. The idea of some YouTube Jim Cramer breathlessly warning viewers that “Surging Sparks is setting a fire under collectors and investors” is the stuff Saturday Night Live sketches are made of.
Yet, there’s nothing silly about the amount of money changing hands in the Pokémon card space these days. Especially right now.
If it weren’t clear from all the viral videos of brawls at various Costcos, the soaring popularity of Pokémon cards has lately reached stratospheric new heights. (Costco ultimately had to institute a “one unit per membership per day” policy on its Pokémon offerings.) Overall value of the cards has spiked by 20% in the past six months—according to Elizabeth Gruene, who oversees Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA)’s pop culture and trading-card-games division—with some individual cards skyrocketing by as much as 150%. And a lot of that increase has happened in just the past few months.
What’s behind the surge? A confluence of events Gruene describes as a “perfect storm,” building on several years of intense interest in Pokémon.
The Pokémon phenomenon originally began in 1996 when Japanese boutique video-game company Game Freak launched the first-ever game in the series. Players set out to capture all 151 species of “pocket monsters” dispersed throughout a magical realm, hence the catchphrase, “Gotta catch ‘em all.” The game was an instant, monster-size hit that spawned a multibillion-dollar empire of movies, TV shows, theme parks, and, of course, trading cards. When it reached the U.S. in 1999, kids across America quickly adopted the catch-‘em-all ethos, tearing through packs in search of rare cards to impress their friends with or—among the more enterprising youngsters—to appreciate in value.
Those kids have since grown into working adults, many of whom now have enough disposable income to buy the rare cards that once eluded them—say, a first-edition Shining Charazard now worth $4,000—or buy packs for their own kids from the Pokémon vending machines now at grocery stores around the U.S. (The standard price for unopened packs is generally $4.49, but good luck getting your hands on them at the moment.) Millennial nostalgia, combined with high-profile superfans like Logan Paul, led to a veritable pokéssance, so to speak, starting in the early part of the pandemic. Pokémon trading cards have since become so popular as a game, as a series of collectibles, and as an investment opportunity, that PSA, the industry leader in assessing the condition and legitimacy of trading cards, now grades more Pokémon cards than baseball or any other sport.
Even with Pokémon interest already fairly high, though, Gruene noticed a massive uptick of late.
“Our submission numbers are just insane right now,” she says. “We have quite a big backlog that we’re working through.”
One of the main drivers of the surge, according to Gruene, is a newly strong release slate. While 2024 was mostly soft in terms of excitement around new Pokémon offerings, November’s Surging Sparks series introduced a lot of highly sought-after cards. That release was followed in January by a new one, Prismatic Evolutions, featuring some extremely popular characters from Pokémon lore, including Eevee and the Eeveelutions. (Some of the chase cards from Prismatic Evolutions—an Umbreon ex Special Illustration Rare card, for instance—are so sought after that they’re already reportedly worth more than $1,500.)
One reason the excitement around certain new releases reverberates beyond players and over to the purely investment-minded crowd is because more new Pokémon cards have instant high value than their sports-cards brethren. While the most valuable baseball cards are overwhelmingly vintage cards, Pokémon produces a greater volume of high-value new cards. A particular rarity from November’s Surging Sparks release, for instance—Pikachu ex Special Illustration Rare—recently sold for $1,000 on eBay.
“With the new sports releases, it has to be a one-of-one or some really low population-count card to have a ton of value, but we don’t really see that as much in Pokémon,” says Gruene. “There might be a new card that comes in 10,000 or 20,000 packs that could each still sell for $1,000-plus. The total market cap for these cards is just a lot bigger than what we see in sports.”
The value of any trading card is determined by the secondary market, and whatever people are willing to pay for it. In the case of Pokémon, people are willing to pay five, six, and in some cases, seven figures, though since the vast majority of packs contain only cards worth as much as the paper they’re printed on makes card-flipping more like gambling than an investment. But booms in value like the one we’re now experiencing, tend to follow excitement around the cards—a hype cycle in which resellers can charge more once demand outpaces supply. While some coveted new releases have helped fuel the current enthusiasm around Pokémon cards, another factor driving it is the Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket.
The game, which came out October 30, recreates the experience of opening packs of Pokémon cards but also adds an immersive element, transporting players into the pocket monsters’ world. By mid-December, the mobile app had already been downloaded more than 60 million times. Popular streamers on Twitch and on YouTube had turned the act of opening packs into a vicarious thrill; TCG Pocket gave those onlookers, and newcomers, a way to experience it themselves. It seems quite likely that the game’s explosive popularity enticed droves of new fans to take the leap from opening virtual packs of cards to seeking out the real thing.
“That was a big cultural moment,” Gruene says. “And we did see a big bump in trading-card submissions around that time frame last year too.”
A final potential factor in the recent spike in Pokémon card value, according to Gruene, is the new partnership between PSA and GameStop. Sending cards off to PSA for grading can be a complicated process for newcomers, but ever since the partnership began last October, card owners can now just drop off their wares at a GameStop and let the workers do the rest. That increased accessibility for a necessary step in selling high-value cards, arriving alongside the new mobile game and some sensational new card series, may have added to the recent value surge. It certainly couldn’t have hurt, at least.
Of course, the danger around this boom is that it could end up being a Beanie Babies-like bubble (and fodder for an Apple TV+ original movie a decade or two after it bursts). Whether the current hype lasts much longer is a mystery for Detective Pikachu, but considering that next year is the 30th anniversary of Pokémon, many more people just may catch it.