You might find something in a London or Chicago middle-sized card store right now that wasn’t there two years ago: stacks of Japanese Pokémon packs lying out in the open on shelves, cheap and easy to grab. There is no lottery. There was no sellout in minutes. Only cards. For collectors who remember how crazy things were in 2020 and 2021, this small change seems big.
The story behind what’s happening is pretty simple, but it takes place over two continents and over several years of excessive speculation. The Japanese Pokémon card market, which grew a lot during the pandemic, is now starting to shrink. Many card shops in Japan have quietly closed because the prices of even the most sought-after collector cards have dropped a lot. A card like the Lillie Full Art drawn by Naoki Saito, which is considered a “holy grail” in Japanese collecting circles, is said to have gone from being worth around $65,000 to less than $15,000. It’s not a dip. That falls apart.
The reason is not a secret. Around the time of the pandemic, a lot of people who weren’t into the game at all bought Pokémon cards. They thought they were investors, but they weren’t really. At the time, it made sense because cards were hard to find and prices were going up. But when that group left the market and sold off their collections, they increased supply and decreased scarcity, which are two things that card values depend on very much. It got worse when people faked things. It became harder to tell the difference between fakes and real items, which made people even less confident in the secondary market.
What’s interesting, and maybe not talked about enough, is how this correction in Japan is opening up real opportunities in other places. Japan has always had a faster and more reliable system for getting things to people than the West. New sets come out earlier, restocks happen often, and prices usually level off soon after a set comes out. When the layer of speculation is taken away, what’s left is a market that works and makes more cards than its own domestic demand can handle. Those cards need to go somewhere.
Western markets, on the other hand, have been behind in the past. A lot of the time, collectors in the U.K. or the U.S. rely on proxy services or local importers who set prices based on old information. When prices drop in Japan, it usually takes a while for those changes to show up on sites like eBay and TCGPlayer. People who keep an eye on Japanese markets, like those on Mercari Japan or CardRush, have known about this gap for a long time. Now that there is more Japanese goods on the market, that gap is harder to ignore, even for casual collectors.
There’s also a cultural side that you should know about. Collectors from the West and Japan don’t always want the same things. In Japan, artwork that makes you feel nostalgic, popular characters, and certain drawing styles are very important, sometimes even more important than how rare something is. People might be more interested in a common card with popular art than a Secret Rare card with a less popular Pokémon on it. This means that the cards that are popular around the world might not be the ones that collectors in the West want the most, and prices don’t always translate correctly. It’s still not clear if this increase in exports will really make prices in the West flat or if it will just change where the arbitrage lives.
There is a calmer side to all of this back in Japan. It looks like kids can buy Pokémon cards again. Rare cards that used to be locked away and worth $300 are now worth about $30. The crowds from release day have thinned out. Toy stores like any other have stock. That part seems important to remember, no matter what the market does next: the game was taken away from the people it was made for for a while.
