Pokémon Has a Serious Problem They Can’t Ignore Anymore

Image via The Pokémon Company Published Sep 1, 2026, 8:51 PM EDT Hannah has been writing about horror, sci-fi, and all things nerdy since 2021. At Collider, she covers news and conducts interviews, along with contributing features that dive deep into genre storytelling and why it works. If there’s something lurking in the shadows, she’s probably already writing about it if she's not too busy watching a tape from her VHS collection. Sign in to your Collider account Pokémon cards are supposed to be fun. That feels like an almost embarrassingly obvious thing to say about colorful pieces of cardboard featuring Pikachu and his several hundred friends, but somewhere along the way, part of the Pokémon Trading Card Game community seems to have forgotten it. Buying Pokémon cards has become a competition before anyone even sits down to play the actual game. Adults track restocks, clear shelves, hoard sealed products, obsess over grading, and flip boxes online because they have convinced themselves Pokémon cards are an investment portfolio. And then a kid walks into the store and there is nothing left. Pokémon has a scalping problem. Everyone knows Pokémon has a scalping problem. The Pokémon Company knows it too, repeatedly acknowledging overwhelming demand, increasing production, reprinting popular products, and implementing purchase restrictions and virtual queues to try to get cards into more hands. But scalpers aren't the worst part of this anymore. The worst part is that a significant portion of the Pokémon card community has created a culture where this behavior feels completely normal. Pokémon Cards Aren't Your Retirement Plan Image via The Pokémon Company There is nothing wrong with an expensive Pokémon card. There is nothing wrong with grading a card, selling one, collecting sealed products, or spending an objectively ridiculous amount of money on a piece of cardboard because it has your favorite Pokémon on it. Adults are allowed to love Pokémon. I am one of them. Pokémon turning 30 this year means millions of us grew up with the franchise and simply never stopped loving it. What's considerably less wonderful is watching people talk about Pokémon cards like they're managing a stock portfolio. Entire corners of the hobby are now built around "investing." Sealed products aren't something to open, they're assets to hold. Cards aren't exciting because they're beautiful or feature someone's favorite Pokémon, they're exciting because an app says the price went up. Products that haven't even been released yet are evaluated based on what someone thinks they might be worth years from now. The language matters because, eventually, the behavior follows it. If an Elite Trainer Box is an "investment," buying one isn't enough. If scarcity makes your collection more valuable, other people being unable to find the product isn't necessarily a problem. It might actually be good for you. That's where scalpers stop being the entire problem and start looking more like a symptom of it. Someone clearing a shelf and immediately listing everything online is obviously gross. The line gets blurrier when someone buys cases of the same product to stick in a closet because they expect scarcity to make it more valuable in five years. Both depend on the same thing: other people not being able to get it. Actual Kids Have to Compete With Adults for Pokémon Cards Image via The Pokémon Company An adult collector has resources a child simply doesn't. They can learn when Target restocks. They can drive to five stores in one morning. They can join an online queue the second something launches. They can spend hundreds of dollars at once or pay a reseller when retail stock disappears. A nine-year-old has birthday money. Those two people should not be competing for the same booster bundle. Yet popular Pokémon products routinely disappear quickly enough that retailers impose purchase limits and Pokémon Center uses virtual queues. The Pokémon Company has repeatedly increased production and reprinted products in an attempt to keep up with demand. The fact that those measures are necessary should tell us how absurd buying Pokémon cards has become. A parent shouldn't need to know a retailer's restocking schedule to buy their kid Pokémon cards. A child shouldn't have to hope there are packs left after an adult buys everything they can get their hands on. Nobody should need to treat the release of a children's trading card set like they're trying to secure concert tickets. And yes, kids have always cared about valuable cards. Playground trades have been brutally capitalistic since someone first convinced another child that three Rattata were absolutely worth one holographic Charizard. But knowing a card is rare is different from being taught that monetary value is the entire point. Pack openings increasingly revolve around the biggest possible pull. Prices appear on-screen. Collections get valued like portfolios. Pulling something rare is immediately followed by checking what it sells for. Do that enough, and it isn't surprising when the first question after opening a beautiful card becomes "How much is this worth?" Something has been lost there. Image via Hannah Hunt at 2026 PokémonXP Maybe this bothered me more than usual because I just spent several days at the 2026 Pokémon World Championships and Pokémon XP. I was completely surrounded by Pokémon. I watched some of the best players in the world compete. I watched kids play and adults play. I saw people trading because someone else had a Pokémon they wanted. I learned more about playing the TCG myself. I watched generations of fans exist in the same space without anyone needing to explain why they cared so much about any of this. That is Pokémon. One of the genuinely remarkable things about this franchise turning 30 is that the children who fell in love with Pokémon in the '90s didn't necessarily grow out of it. We grew up, got jobs, ideally acquired some disposable income, and kept loving these weird little creatures. Now another generation gets to love them too. Being an adult Pokémon fan isn't the problem, but using the advantages of being an adult to exploit younger Pokémon fans is. There is a difference between collecting and extracting. There is a difference between owning something valuable and needing everything you own to become more valuable. There is a difference between buying Pokémon cards because you love Pokémon and buying Pokémon cards because you know somebody else desperately wants them. Pokémon doesn't need to choose between adult collectors and children. The franchise has lasted three decades because it has managed to keep the people who grew up with it while constantly finding new kids willing to fall in love with it. Today's eight-year-old opening their first booster pack is tomorrow's 30-year-old flying across the country for Pokémon Worlds. But that only happens if the eight-year-old gets the booster pack. Pokémon can print more cards. Retailers can limit purchases. The Pokémon Company can make scalping and hoarding increasingly difficult and unrewarding. But part of this is on us. At some point, the Pokémon card community has to decide what it wants this hobby to be. Because if a child walks into a store looking for Pokémon cards and finds an empty shelf while an adult is listing those same cards online from the parking lot, it doesn't really matter how much that collection is supposedly worth: we've already made it cost too much. Release Date 1997 - 2023-00-00 Network TV Tokyo, TV Osaka, TV Aichi, TVh, TVQ, TSC Directors Shigeru Omachi, Koji Ogawa, Fumihiro Ueno, Hideki Hiroshima, Maki Kodaira, Makoto Ooga, Ayumi Moriyama, Keitaro Motonaga, Shigeru Ueda, Fumihiro Yoshimura, Minoru Ohara, Yoshitaka Makino, Kiyoshi Egami, Makoto Sokuza, Bjarne Heuser, Naoki Murata, Kenichi Nishida, Tomoe Makino, Masahiko Watanabe, Hiroaki Takagi, Tazumi Mukaiyama, Ryohei Horiuchi, Yoshihiro Oda, Hiromichi Matano Cast Rica Matsumoto Satoshi (voice) Ikue Otani Pikachu (voice) Writers Junki Takegami, Atsuhiro Tomioka, Hideki Sonoda, Yukiyoshi Ôhashi, Yuka Miyata, Takeshi Shudo, Shouji Yonemura, Shinzo Fujita, Michihiro Tsuchiya, Deko Akao, Reiko Yoshida, Aya Matsui, Junichi Fujisaku Franchise(s) Pokemon Creator(s) Naoko Takeuchi