Time To ADAPT To The Changing Pokemon Market!

追加: 2026-05-12

[00:00:01]Folks, welcome back. The rules of the Pokemon market have changed.

[00:00:10]Simple as that. The rules of Pokemon investing have changed. It is going to change the way that I view these things, the life cycles, the timing of when to buy, and uh what I put my money into when these new sets are released.

[00:00:28]A lot of the advice that I've given is now seemingly outdated, especially for the time being. And it's starting to become wrong advice. I can say it. It's just wrong. I mean, if no one else wants to admit it, they don't have to. Um, we can sit here and argue like boomers about how, you know, irrational this market is and how emotional everyone is.

[00:00:48]But at the end of the day, it's happened enough times now where I'm ready to say it. I think the move to buy a lot of these sets and a lot of these singles is right after release.

[00:00:59]Look at Ascended Heroes. Ascended Heroes was pretty much unanimously agreed upon by all the great minds of the Pokemon influencer world that the cards were overvalued and not to buy these singles at release because these were ripoff scam prices and they were going to come down as more and more got opened as they became more plentiful on the market and you should wait. And I agree that used to be the way the market worked. In fact, the best thing to do when you were moving into singles or trying to complete sets was to wait 6 months to a year when enough packs had been open, enough singles had flushed the market, enough grading cards had went through the the systems and all the population reports exploded and um by that time a lot of the sets were kind of at their all-time lowest popularity because they had been out for a year. Other sets had come out. A lot of the cars were plentiful and demand has all all decreased. And so that was usually a time to move in and start to buy those cards when they started to flatline near what their lows were.

[00:01:58]Now you look at Ascended Heroes, all the cards are 50 to 100% more on a lot of the big ones from what they were at release. I mean, go look at Gengar release. Go look at Pikachu at release.

[00:02:08]Go look at Dragonite at release. All the prices are higher. And a lot of you are going to say, "Well, Alex has Ascended Heroes. I mean, the ETBs released at 100 to 120. Now they're moving on to $200.

[00:02:19]True. Let's say Fantasmal Flames.

[00:02:22]Everyone said, "Alex, this Charizard is too easy to hit. There's not enough sirs in this set. It's a great card. It'll be a great buy, but at 3, 4, 500." In fact, I agreed with that point. I agreed with it on multiple live streams where I thought it was going to fall harder and I was going to jump in when it did.

[00:02:41]Never happened. It had a slight decrease after release for a few weeks and then it immediately ran back up to all-time highs, even higher than pre-release prices. The box did the same thing.

[00:02:51]Everyone thought the boxes were crazy, you know, when they were $300, fell down in the low 2000s, mid200s. Thought it was crazy. Those boxes are near $500 now. And what's funny about it is people think that's crazy. And and the only reason it's crazy is the age because the value inside it actually makes somewhat sense. When you go look at Silver Tempest and you look at the value of the Lugia and the value of the Rayquaza V-Max and the value of the other cards in Silver Tempest and you compare that to the value of the cards in Fantasmal Flames, they're very similar. In fact, Fantasmal has higher value on their top cards. So why wouldn't it deserve to be the same price as Silver Tempest? Oh, that's right. Cuz it's older. That's the only reason. And so then you look at Mega Evolution. You know, there's there's some similarities. The sealed product definitely ran up afterwards, right? We look at Destined Rivals and you can kind of keep going down the list, you start realizing, wait, the old boomer way of waiting 6 months to a year to buy singles, it's not the way anymore. The waiting for these massive reprints 6 months to a year, it doesn't work anymore. You just buy at release. And it doesn't matter what the price is. It doesn't matter if it's, you know, 100 to 120 ATB. It doesn't matter if it's 250 a booster box. It still seems like the trend is your friend to buy at release. And really, the worst case scenario is what? You you basically are staying stagnant, not a lot of growth. I mean, let's take perfect order. Perfect order. You bought perfect order at release. Are you really down money? Are you about even? Have you really lost much? Perfect order singles.

[00:04:26]Some people are actually doing well on the singles. Have you seen the Meowth? I mean, some of these singles, even in perfect order, a set nobody wants with with packs nobody wants to open with cards no one is even that excited about, you're still seeing growth and good performance in the singles.

[00:04:44]And so, I'm looking ahead at Chaos Rising. I'm looking at Pitch Black and I'm saying, am I really going to stay in this narrow mindset and and and you know, be on the sidelines saying, "Everyone's irrational. This market's so emotional.

[00:04:58]All these people are stupid. Okay, great. But as long as the market keeps doing this because of all these irrational stupid people, I might as well get in the freaking game. And so I am probably going to make single plays very near the time of release after release on a lot of these chaos rising and pitch black cards depending on the the cards I identify that are going to be good plays whether they be uh grading plays whether they be a sitting on the singles uh illustration rares special illustration rares and I'm just going to make the play and you can say well Alex what about you know the population boards rising the cards coming they're not eroding away they're not coming down after release. In fact, a lot of these singles again are rising after release.

[00:05:41]So even if you send in the PSA, pay an upgraded rate so you get them done faster and get them back to you quicker.

[00:05:46]You're almost still going to be fine if they get a nine because by that time the raw single will probably have risen because there is just simply too much demand in this hobby at this point and Pokemon is just not putting out enough product at these releases to quench that demand. Everything's on waves now.

[00:06:02]Everything. Two waves, three waves.

[00:06:04]Heck, you don't even get your waves till I don't even know when. We we still don't have our perfect order wave 2. Do you guys know that we still do not have perfect order wave 2 from distributors hasn't showed up yet. So we're going to have the first wave of Cast Rising, which is probably going to be more popular set than Perfect Order cuz it's got the Greninja people apparently want Ninja Spinner. People want to chase it in Japanese. So probably going to be the same, if not worse situation than Perfect Order. Whereas, you know, the top singles are probably going to rise.

[00:06:32]The product's going to be pretty scarce.

[00:06:34]Probably going to hold up very well. a booster box 225 250 if it sells out quick enough without the the second wave is probably going to run up and I think you're probably better off putting your money to work taking some chance on these plays than sitting out. Now there's always a level of risk but again I really feel like in this market until we see something shift the risk of sitting out is still worse than the risk of getting involved and possibly seeing a downturn. That's just how I feel. So that's how I'm going to continue to play this hobby at this point. Um, I don't know how this ends.

[00:07:11]We have a weak set in Perfect Order.

[00:07:13]Everyone thought when Pokemon printed a week set it would slow down.

[00:07:18]It hasn't slowed down. In fact, Perfect Order is still over $200 a box. Ascended Heroes obviously is taking the brunt of it and taking all the attention, but even Fantasmal Flames has some of that attention because have you guys seen those packs? I mean, they're running to like 112 a pack already on Fantasmal Flames and the boxes are going to be 500. You have Mega Evolution, I mean, that's in the 300s. You got Destin Rivals at 600. Even Journey Together enhanced boxes are running up to close to $300 now. And you start looking at all this, you're like, how how does this end, right? just this this random Armageddon style crash comes out of nowhere where someone flips a switch and suddenly nobody wants Pokemon anymore?

[00:08:00]Or if demand starts to fade and price points become too high and consumers start to push back, do prices pull back 10, 20, 25, 30% at the most until a lot of the big money says, "Hey, that's too cheap. I'm going to buy them up." Or consumers finally say, "Hey, that seems like a deal. That sounds cheap. I'll buy it up." or you know May May's here the Mayhem sale from TCG player is that gonna come this year? You don't think people are going to take advantage of what 10% off or 10% credit back on TCG player and start buying up crazy amounts of supply there? Probably. And so I feel the same thing a lot of you feel.

[00:08:40]I think a lot of people feel the same thing about the stock market right now.

[00:08:43]Everyone feels things are overinflated.

[00:08:46]They're too high. They've been too high for too long.

[00:08:50]things are seemingly going up with not a lot of explanation why, but every time they get push back, they just go up even more. And the people that are missing out the most are the ones that are not taking action or people getting hurt the most, I should say, are the people that are not taking action and missing out.

[00:09:06]The people who are not getting hurt are the ones that are jumping in um on the stock market.

[00:09:12]When you look at the double leveraged, triple leveraged ETFs out there that you know they trade different segments of the of the market or they trade different stocks at 2x or 3x um strength.

[00:09:27]Those are some of the the plays that are now having the most amount of investor money go into. So people are no longer just wanting to bet on the stock itself.

[00:09:36]That's not enough. People want to bet on the stock, but like 2x and 3x times the stock because they believe in it even that strongly or they want to take that big of a risk. And I think that's indicative of what's happening with Pokemon. People are just doubling down and tripling down, right? People that used to buy one box are now buying one case. People that used to, you know, buy a single, they're want to buy, you know, a binder full of singles or multiple PSA slabs because they believe in the market so strongly. And because enough people believe in it and they continue to buy, it makes the market scarce and it drives the price up because there's just not enough to go around for all the people that want it.

[00:10:11]And I try to go through scenarios in my head on how this stops or how it slows down or, you know, who's left holding the bag. And I don't know, guys. I I feel like there's enough new money, enough money slashing around, enough unrealized gains built up, enough, um, established stores, established sellers, established investors that we may be in for a longer ride on this stuff than any of us know.

[00:10:37]And so, um, all you can do is adapt and try to survive or you can kind of get run over. And so, I'm going to try to adapt. I'm going to try to make, um, more quicker plays out of the gate on a lot of this new stuff, which I'm sure others are going to do the same thing.

[00:10:50]And um we'll do it till we get punished.

[00:10:53]Shout out Z&G Emporium, right? Never punished. Seems like all too often in this hobby, you could uh you could put that neon sign behind you like James used to and say you never get punished.

[00:11:04]So why not keep trying taking the risk?

[00:11:06]Because that is truly how it feels in this hobby. No matter how much you buy, what product it is, as long as you wait long enough, it always goes up. And so until that fails, I guess we're going in. So, it's all I got, guys. Hopefully the talk uh I don't know, helped you make some decision out there. It's all I got. We're out.