How It Started and How It's Going: Why 2025?
It all began as a young child, I begrudgingly browsed local flea markets and farmer's markets, absolutely not impressed by much - I mean, which kids are? Fruits, veggies... lame.
Of course that was how it began, but I was remiss to find that at almost every single one of these pop up events, little treasures were buried among the lameness - tucked somewhere, usually at the end of these event lineups, in brown boxes that sat on the ground. Shining like gold in the distance.
That was exactly where it started, right there in those boxes.
Cheap Beyblades
Weird overly foil-y Pokémon trading card packs (including strange mixtures of characters that absolutely should not have been together)
Endless Yu-Gi-Oh cards
Bootleg Bakugan (those have a nice ring to them)
For a kid? All these toys? I was hooked! Of course I begged for them... and I was promptly met with
"Those are chintzy, you don't want those."
Pulled away and denied. It was a true tragedy.
From there of course I ogled at them every time we hit those little markets. Always wanting them.
What kid didn't want a Top Spin Rapidity Blade Top?
I would've been the coolest kid in my class!
Years passed, maybe two or three, and I ended up receiving a weekly allowance, as kids do...
So of course, I hit the markets harder than they'd ever been hit.
The relics of those days don't exist in the same way they did then, I've either lost or thrown a bunch of them away, but when I say most of my allowance went into bootleg Yu-Gi-Oh cards (that for some reason never had the correct names), and Pokémon with HP higher than ... well... higher than Arceus I guess, I did exactly that.
About $5 here and there, and I had a balling collection. (Some of them are still floating around somewhere, actually).
Long story short - it spiraled from there, I eventually discovered the internet and the many corners of bootleg paradise that it held.
I fell off of the collecting market for a while, and recently like any good obsession, it has come back in adulthood.
My love for Pokémon had never really left. I mean, I played the games from childhood into adulthood, and still find myself doing runs through Pokémon Crystal - but as it goes, I have been drawn back in.
So of course with that I got back into collecting the cards!
Well... I tried anyway. The market for Pokémon in 2025 is absolute insanity.
Bro guys pushing kids out of the way for new boxes
"Poké-Investors" opening packs on livestreams and only caring about value
scalpers, bots, and empty shelves
Logan Paul
It's exhausting...
I tried to get back into my many other hobbies, hopefully to fill the gap where non-existent Pokémon cards once existed... only to discover that those too are elusive, and frankly leaving me a bit disillusioned by the price (Retro Games and Magic: The Gathering to name a couple)
Everything has become such a commodity, my childhood, my material joys, commodified and next to impossible to get. Investors and collectors eating up the market.
In a time where the world is suffering economically, cards are at an all time high in scarcity and collectibles are lucrative as ever a light shines in the distance. A shiny, chintzy holofoil light. What is it?
Bootlegs.
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