It's literally a card game. You can argue the utility and use case are stupid, or wildly less than the cost would suggest, but it's silly to say there is no utility, even if most collectors don't play the game.
It's literally a card game. You can argue the utility and use case are stupid, or wildly less than the cost would suggest, but it's silly to say there is no utility, even if most collectors don't play the game.
But as soon as you play the game with them, they immediately devalue.
It's just gambling and a greater fool dependent market all over again.
Also, I don't know a single person that actually enjoys playing the game. There are no popular online pokemon card games (like MTG or Board Game Arena).
Pokemon company did a terrible job designing and evolving the game itself..
That's blatantly wrong. PTCGL is the online card game, you don't hear much about it because it's basically free and there's no strong incentive to market it to you.
In person, the competitive scene in western countries is larger than MTG right now, and on the same scale as Riftbound. In Japan it's always been the biggest by an order of magnitude. The two big western open entry tournaments, EUIC / NAIC, sell out ~4,000 player tickets in a matter of seconds. Regionals tournaments that happen almost twice a month throughout the year sell out ~2K-3K player tickets in a matter of minutes.
What about value driven by format legality? A lot of magic cards are valuable for format specific reasons.
My understanding is that Pokémon is surprisingly cheap if you want to actually play the game as they reprint staples to oblivion (often <100$ for tier one decks). It’s all collection based , which in and of itself is not necessarily an indictment on the value of Pokémon cards, but is much closer to greater fool theory than I’m comfortable with .
The main reason is that these days every rare collectible card in Pokémon is an alternate version of a cheaper card from the same set. For example, N's Zoroark ex ASC 286/217 is a $120 card, but the same set has a more common, mechanically identical $1 card numbered 137/217.
This is very much intended so that collectors chasing the nice full art / textured rare cards flood the second hand market with the less desirable cheaper versions. Players can then easily buy those cards for almost nothing and with ample volume available.