“Black Bolt” and “White Flare” to Experience Severe Shortages, But TPCi Now Catching Up!

[HershelLayton]

Maybe hearing "just wait. Product is coming in the next 6-8 months" doesn’t cut it anymore when this started 6-8 months ago and they don't have much to show for it. Pokemon gives a statement on social media and obliviously moves on to the next gigantic set that they've stuffed with new sparklies as if they're afraid they aren't going to sell out within 30 seconds.

This is the most profitable IP in the universe and they are struggling to let fans GIVE THEM MONEY. With that kind of incompetence it's understandable that peoples' sympathies are drying up or they're moving on from the hobby entirely because Pokemon can't pull themselves together. And considering they've announced product shortages for a set that isn't even releasing for another two months, it's arguably not "gotten better after 6-8 months."

I agree; I think people are too focused on this mystical group of scalpers when the issue of TPCI realize they don't need to do anything and all of their product will instantly be sold out with no effort required. Unfortunately their short-term focus will backfire if this generation of kids have no chance of actually getting into the franchise. Pokemon cards are valuable because generations of kids got to get hooked; at a certain point it'll just be gen X/millenials playing hot potato with their overpriced cards because they wanted to be greedy and gobble every product they ever find like fat pigs.

 

[Alkhemist]

Gee I wonder why you are telling me I am wrong and defending scalping. Nah dude, everyone can see whats happening, its not hard or even hidden. If you think you are pulling a wool over peoples eyes to say "No thats not whats happening" I got some bad news for you. I seriously hope the best for your patrons, seeing how you do not.

Crazy how you managed to reply to nothing of what i said. You know nothing about me, you know nothing about my company. If you had even bothered to ask, we're one of very few stores in wisconsin that has a strict MSRP policy, but you don't care about any of that. For whatever reason you just want to push actual conspiracy level misinformation on how the card economy works cause you talked to a distributor employee one time or read an article or something or other. I'm incredibly tired of these histrionics from armchair economists who can't wrap their heads around supply and demand and i especially have no tolerance for people who think what few brick and mortar games stores are left are at fault for market fluctuations we couldnt control even if we wanted to.

 

[Alkhemist]

Okay I kind of understand more why people are angry at LGSes if they're throwing their stuff on ebay and TCGplayer, none of the LGSes in my area do that afaik, I'm guessing it's more of a thing in the US than in Canada.

Almost all stores in the united states deal with TCGplayer in one way or another. You basically can't survive as an LGS without using TCGplayer in one way, shape or form. It's an overwhelmingly dominant force over the market.

 

[Alkhemist]

People need to keep in mind that LGSes don't buy product directly from Pokemon, they buy it from distributors so if the distributors aren't selling it to the stores for a price where the LGS can afford to sell it at MSRP that affects the end consumer price, this is the same thing affecting graphics card prices, during a shortage people are dipping all through the chain.

Moreover I'd much rather my LGSes make some extra money on the sealed product they sell than have all of that price gap between msrp and scalpers go to the scalpers, msrp is suggested retail price, not a guarantee, not a right. Running a small business like that isn't easy and I've seen plenty of LGSes close.

not to mention the multiple controversies over certain distributors funneling product to their own LGSs or hoarding product to sell at higher prices once first wave allocations hit. Theres problems all the way down the pipe that need to be resolved before any of this gets better.

 

[Nirvanna21]

Crazy how you managed to reply to nothing of what i said. You know nothing about me, you know nothing about my company. If you had even bothered to ask, we're one of very few stores in wisconsin that has a strict MSRP policy, but you don't care about any of that. For whatever reason you just want to push actual conspiracy level misinformation on how the card economy works cause you talked to a distributor employee one time or read an article or something or other. I'm incredibly tired of these histrionics from armchair economists who can't wrap their heads around supply and demand and i especially have no tolerance for people who think what few brick and mortar games stores are left are at fault for market fluctuations we couldnt control even if we wanted to.

As a business owner, it's your duty to actually make money. Personally, I don't see a problem with that aspect. But the supply and demand is artificial.

The thing is, from a collectors perspective I would love to see a delay in set releases so that ample product is available on release as opposed to being re-released. But, because we have rotations this is impossible because we would have to have Japan delay their releases as well.

Japan can kinda keep up with its own demand, but international is something much bigger. Even if they invested in another printing factory, it's a gamble because nothing lasts forever.

The way things are being handled at the moment is awful. Eventually this will all go down in a cluster, maybe not short term, but definitely long term. I myself plan to leave this hobby after DR because it is simply not fun. It's expensive, it's demoralizing seeing a generation of kids caring more about the financials than anything else. I will still watch from the side lines, comment and everything but that's it. I'm one less customer going forward. Eventually all that will be left are investors with no one interested in what they have.

 

[Alkhemist]

As a business owner, it's your duty to actually make money. Personally, I don't see a problem with that aspect. But the supply and demand is artificial.

The thing is, from a collectors perspective I would love to see a delay in set releases so that ample product is available on release as opposed to being re-released. But, because we have rotations this is impossible because we would have to have Japan delay their releases as well.

Japan can kinda keep up with its own demand, but international is something much bigger. Even if they invested in another printing factory, it's a gamble because nothing lasts forever.

The way things are being handled at the moment is awful. Eventually this will all go down in a cluster, maybe not short term, but definitely long term. I myself plan to leave this hobby after DR because it is simply not fun. It's expensive, it's demoralizing seeing a generation of kids caring more about the financials than anything else. I will still watch from the side lines, comment and everything but that's it. I'm one less customer going forward. Eventually all that will be left are investors with no one interested in what they have.

I'll be so real with you, they could make it so that they're dropping 4 sets a year with actually strong supply and words cant describe how happy i would be with this setup. The current setup is an absolute mess from the top down and it's not sustainable, even for the most profitable company in the world.

 

[leetic]

You know how bad things are? To this day, I have never seen any Surging Sparks products in stores. It's getting to the point that even the EX battle decks, which used to be the one thing that scalpers left alone, are now being picked clean. At this point, doing fentanyl is now a more economical hobby. It's so bad that I went back to collecting Cipher, because somehow collecting for a dead card game is less depressing than the current state of the Pokémon TCG, only for that to be killed again by the tariffs. Why can't there be anything nice anymore.

 

[Shining Goodra]

You know how bad things are? To this day, I have never seen any Surging Sparks products in stores. It's getting to the point that even the EX battle decks, which used to be the one thing that scalpers left alone, are now being picked clean. At this point, doing fentanyl is now a more economical hobby. It's so bad that I went back to collecting Cipher, because somehow collecting for a dead card game is less depressing than the current state of the Pokémon TCG, only for that to be killed again by the tariffs. Why can't there be anything nice anymore.

I've found several places with Surging Sparks but the boxes are 250$+ Even Journey together is being sold but 7$ a pack, it's ridiculous...

 

[illmatic19]

I've yet to find any Surging for reasonable prices unless it was in the Grand Adventure collection or some other product. No booster bundles, etbs, let alone a booster box lol.

 

[CDUB]

"Never give in to FOMO. Never pay scalpers for product." Unfortunately here in Canada, the distributors are the scalpers.

Latest example; Prismatic Super Premium per unit.
TPC price: $116.99 CAD
Game Stop price: $249.99 CAD
Average LGS Price: $359.00 CAD
Distributor Price: $225.00 CAD

 

[Poketchset]

Interesting.... and also
Its already been said a lot.... doesn't really matter how much they print if local shops are gonna charge reseller prices... the store I was at today had a ton of Prismatic... upc's etb's.... etc.... but I'm not paying $265 for a upc... my daughter will just have to wait.... I'd pay up to $120 for one.... to a local shop anyway.... not a big corp.... I tried at a local Best Buy.... got there at 4:30am Fri but was 2nd in line... they had 1 upc and 1 tin.... the mom and son in front of me we're kind enough to leave the tin for me.... maybe they should just pull all distribution entirely and sell it all thru the pokemon center.... sounds like buying stock at msrp would be cheaper for some shops rn anyhow.... its on pokemon for not getting rid of garbage like mj holdings

 

[Poketchset]

yes, obviously if a store is selling product at msrp, which still is them making a profit, support them. But the bad news is that 95% of stores are screwing over their patrons. To say that they are battling scalpers is untue. For them to "battle" them they would have to be challenged by them. Scalpers are doing shading things to get product. But for the most part they are still buying the product at MSRP, mostly, to sell at triple the price. Stores only have to get on the phone, call their distributor, pay distributor prices which is not MSRP, but they sell the product at triple MSRP. Is it possible to find shops that dont screw over their patrons? Yeah sure. But 95% are getting their product, and selling it for way more. Also, if every store sold their product for MSRP, then scalpers would honestly have way less power, but because they know that people who want the product can only turn to the LGS and scalpers selling them at $250, they know they can sell them for $250.

Tldr
Yes support good local game store. Sadly they are not easily found, and all other local game shops are the problem and you should not support them.

My local store has quietly mentioned their disto is charging more than msrp in some cases.....

 

[Poketchset]

LGS in my country have the booster boxes from SSP and JTG from 210€ to 220€ (if in stock). Before this recent panic booster boxes were around 190€ to 200€ (even for the "not-so-interesting" sets like SVI and PAL -personally I love them, especially for the hit rates-).
Big stores are usually even more expensive.
So, I can say it's very hard to support any of them if the prices even before this craze were a rip-off and now just got worse, they have a 2pack tin from PRE for ~25€ ... for the rest of the PRE products the average price is around 10€ per pack the product has inside.
The PRE Prismatic Evolutions – Super-Premium Collection for 220€
A DRI ETB for 80€ (usually they go for 65€ to 70€).
It is (or was before this scalpers galore) way cheaper to buy the more expensive products (like ETBs, premium collections, booster boxes etc) from cardmarket and pay the shipping fees around 15€ (usually I buy more products at the same time since shipping costs do not scale lineary) than buy locally.
Only one store sold PRE tins for MSRP with the condition to unseal them at the store (no problem for me I wanted to open the packs) and ofcourse I went and bought one (purchase limit).

We'd be happy to unseal and open at the store

 

[Poketchset]

Rotation date is starting to look interesting.... would they push it back until June-ish so ppl can play G longer... ?? Ppl need to be able to buy cards to play the trading card game (go figure)
I wouldn't think Pokémon would give a about the secondary market. They don't make money off it so reseller prices don't matter at all to them. And yet because of rotation, they can print the hell out of cards and it doesn't affect the game. Sooooooo.... I would never advocate for this.... but damnit it seems like someone should be fired.... how much profeta are they leaving on the table rn....

 

[Poketchset]

Rotation date is starting to look interesting.... would they push it back until June-ish so ppl can play G longer... ?? Ppl need to be able to buy cards to play the trading card game (go figure)
I wouldn't think Pokémon would give a about the secondary market. They don't make money off it so reseller prices don't matter at all to them. And yet because of rotation, they can print the hell out of cards and it doesn't affect the game. Sooooooo.... I would never advocate for this.... but damnit it seems like someone should be fired.... how much profeta are they leaving on the table rn....

*... how much profit are they
I guess we'll be on J by this time next year... but they need to get more cards out.... and they cant be sitting on shelves marked up 3x (or more) msrp....

 

[bakugames]

guys actually theyre doing 5d chess of scaring people off the hobby so that scalpers have no one to sell to which means they lose massive profit and stop buying and it returns to normalcy or something. Not super serious but i wouldn't be surprised if tpci prefers to ride this scalper surge and then use the soon to happen market bubble pop to become accessible again

 

[JohnFoster]

My local store has quietly mentioned their disto is charging more than msrp in some cases....

I am not doubting thats a possibility, but unless you have seen the invoices like I have, I wouldnt believe it. But hey I wouldnt put it past distributors either at this point.

 

[The Binder Guy]

I decided to read the article again and I'm still not buying any of this considering that we're still dealing with stores selling out the minute they get stock. In addition to that, there's one bit that's really rubbing me the wrong way:

Currently, TPCi is printing future sets at maximum capacity.

TPCi may say they're printing at maximum capacity but a recent discovery of two misprinted Poké Ball holos featuring the names of two football players might throw that into question. The best case scenario would be that it's from a printer that TPCi is outsourcing additional printing to while the worst case would be that MPG still has non-Pokémon contracts to fulfill that are taking valuable printer space and time away from printing more Pokémon cards.

I'll be so real with you, they could make it so that they're dropping 4 sets a year with actually strong supply and words cant describe how happy i would be with this setup. The current setup is an absolute mess from the top down and it's not sustainable, even for the most profitable company in the world.

TPCi has had too many successful recent sets to ever consider changing the way they release sets, only "bad" sets we've actually had were Pokémon GO and Shrouded Fable. Long gone are the days of special sets having a cyclical "good set and mid set" style of release.

 

[Yaginku]

TPCi has had too many successful recent sets to ever consider changing the way they release sets, only "bad" sets we've actually had were Pokémon GO and Shrouded Fable.

Pokemon GO is by all means a success, it was meant to be a set targeted at actual children and newcomers. Its main place is in big-box stores, checklanes, toy stores, etc, where I see it selling constantly. It was actually printed at a massive scale, in big part to combat the fake "Pokemon GO" counterfeits from China. They've been a big problem, since parents often Google these cards are buy counterfeits from local resellers.
Color me surprised - when their bottom-line is threatened, TPC can actually print a ton of cards.

 

[Bionicleforever12]

they'll be normalcy eventually. Then we'll have people complaining how the sets not good. The only thing that could delay this is an upcharging distro is doing, making it hard for retailers to even sell at a reasonable price. But with enough supply from pokemon and enough downward pressure distro will have to bend the knee eventually. It just takes time.