The rumors are true, the Pokemon Trading Card Game is launching a special expansion this September to celebrate the original 151 Pokemon called, appropriately, Scarlet & Violet—151. The set will feature every Pokemon from♛ the original games reimagined in the Paldea region, with plenty of ex, ultra rare, and special illustration cards to hunt down. Pre-orders have already started (and sold out) on the Pokemon Center. GameStop and Best Buy will have their own promo cards. Massively overpriced eBay listings are already cropping up. It’s going ൲to be a whole big thing, but can we please try to be normal about it?
It’s been a while since there was this much hype around an expansion. Last year’s Crown Zenith was popular for its gorgeous Galarian Gallery and 2021’s Celebrations struck a chord with long-time creators, but we haven't seen hype like this since 2019’s Hidden Fates brough shinies to the game in a big way. Going back even further, the Evolutions set had incredible staying power because it contained tons of reprints of base set cards. Like 151, it was ticking lots of nostalgia boxes for collectors and casual Pokemon fans. Evolutions was also so over-printed that it was still easy to find some products three years after it first launched. Pokemon hasn’t printed a set like Evolutions since then, and I highly doubt 151 will be an exception.
I know I still have unprocessed Covid trauma, but I worry about the kinds of people who are going to be attracted to 151. Pokemon card collecting hit a new peak in 2020 thanks to pandemic boredom and Logan Paul, who manipulated the market by overspending on vintage cards so severely that it created an industry-wide boom. Suddenly, every short-term investor and ma𒀰rket speculator saw Pokemon as a viable investment, and all the available products flew off the shelves overnight. For most of the Sword & Shield era, it was almost impossible to find cards without overpaying resellers on eBay for the privilege, and it took years for stocks to recover.
I often lay the blame on Paul and the content creator community for turning my hobby into a circus, but their public spending spree was only a microcosm for a broader social issue. Social media notoriety, the over-commodification of nostalgia, and the rise of the gig economy have turned all of us into little weird little goblins that can’t enjoy anything unless we have a way to make money from it. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:We have sold our childhoods and turned everything we used to love into a side hustle. It’s so easy to forget why we love Pokemon and TCGs in the first place when there’s a buck to be made, and 151 is already getting a lot🌌 of people excited fo💞r the wrong reasons.
All I’m saying is: buy 151, open it, play with it, enjoy it. Share it with your cousins and nephews. Go to a pre-release event at your local game store. Make some new friends. Please don’t buy a case and shove it in the back of your closet bꦫecause you think in 20 years someone will pay you $10k to see if there’s a Charizard in there. Don’t spend double or triple the MSRP for packs from online resellers. Don’t load up a cart full of stuff that you have no intention of keeping just because Target doesn’t have an item limit. Please be normal about this. It is a card game for children after all. If there’s nothing left on the shelves for the kids to discover, who exactly do you think is going to buy all of your sealed product in 20 years?