Lucky people sometimes don’t say anything about their good luck. It doesn’t come with a big deal or a dramatic reveal. Someone may have dropped it off in a dirty cardboard box on a Tuesday afternoon and asked for enough cash to cover rent.
That’s pretty much how it began for the owner of a pawn shop in Houston. He found himself with a small fortune in Pokémon cards while he was judging used guitars and answering calls about used jewelry. It wasn’t in his plans. He hadn’t looked into it. It was getting more and more crowded with obsessive collectors and sharp-eyed sellers who ran spreadsheets and Discord channels. He was just a normal guy who bought whatever came in the door. That was enough in some way.
It turned out that the timing was so perfect that it was almost silly. Between 2004 and 2020, data that tracked the Pokémon secondary market showed that the average price of a card had already gone up by about 282%. Then there was the pandemic, people got bored, and nostalgia hit hard. From 2020 to 2026, that average price went up by about 1,350%. Even though it was very bullish during that time, the S&P 500 only made it to 120%. Over the stock market, Pokémon cards, which were sitting quietly in plastic sleeves, were like waves. In that situation, the pawn shop wasn’t just a pawn shop. It was a vault that got stuck.
Besides the fact that it is obviously ridiculous, what makes this story worth listening to is how different it is from all the other stories that are trying to teach us something. A lot of people use Pokémon cards as a way to figure out how they feel about money and risk. There’s someone like Todd, a Texas man who went on The Dave Ramsey Show after racking up between $10,000 and $15,000 in credit card debt buying cards to sell on eBay, for every pawn shop owner who got lucky. He had sold nothing at all. He said, “I kind of just went with the flow because I saw other success stories.” That may be the most honest thing someone has said about risky investing in a while.
Dave Ramsey, who is known for being direct, told Todd to get two jobs and call his friends to help him load the goods. There’s a lesson there somewhere, even if it’s not very pleasant: Todd and the Houston pawn shop owner are not really smarter or more diligent than each other. It’s timing, and the fact that you didn’t want it so badly that you made risky choices to get it is a big plus.
There is a unique feel to the Pokémon collector scene in Houston that is worth mentioning. A local collector named Nazario had a rare Pokémon card that was only available in Japan stolen from his vendor table at a recent Collect-A-Con event at the George R. Brown Convention Center. The card was worth about $4,000 USD. He was having a conversation with a customer when it disappeared. “Something else caught my attention,” he said. The card was found when the person who was thought to have stolen it went into a store in Pearland and tried to sell it. The store owner saw it on a Facebook post that Nazario had made for a local collectors group, so he stopped the man and called the police. When police arrived, the suspect ran off, but the shop was able to take a picture of his license plate.
It’s only a small part of a bigger story, but it really shows where the Pokémon card market is now. It changes from a hobby to something else when a single piece of cardboard can fetch $4,000 at a convention. It becomes something worth stealing, obsessing over, and going into debt for.
The owner of the pawn shop in Houston probably gets this now better than most people. It started out as a normal inventory, but now he has to carefully think about things like storage, safety, pricing, and where the items came from. The cards didn’t stay simple just because they were simple to begin with.
As I’ve watched all of this happen, I feel like the Pokémon economy has turned into a mirror. It shows back to the person whatever they put into it, whether they are a patient collector, a desperate flipper, an accidental millionaire, or a thief at a convention table. It’s the same cardboard. The results were very different.
The 30th anniversary of Pokémon is coming up in 2026. Ten billion official cards were printed in 2025 alone, and demand is still said to be higher than supply. This Pokémon fever is not likely to end any time soon. That might or might not be a good thing, depending on how you got involved in the first place.
