Oh good sweet
LORD, he went and put it the damn thing on a gaudy bling chain to show it off at his “wrestling” matches. If that thing gets damaged during those fixed shows I think the fandom’s rage would be enough to flash-fry that cocky-yet-completely-bald rooster from orbit.
Scalping is/was caused by
supply and demand issues that started during the pandemic, like all TCGs. It's not just Pokemon, it's sports cards and Magic too
It isn’t just scaping that’s is/was an issue, but retailers’ inability to keep the products stocked
even with product limits put in place. An X-amount-of-items-per-person-per-day limit is a good start, but when you don’t put limits on certain products (who in their
right mind is buying 5 ETBs from a Target store) then you run the risk of keeping shelves bare for weeks (if not months) at a time and that’s not exactly a good look for said stores. You know those Eternatus VMAX Premium Collection boxes? I remember seeing those shelf-warm at my local Targets for a while when they dropped in Early September 2020, but come Late September 2020 and it suddenly became
very, very hard to find ANY sort of TCG product in stores.
The narrative that it's all Logan Paul's fault comes from people who couldn't see the larger picture during the pandemic and pinned it on a notable face in an attempt to come up with an explanation for what was happening. I was honestly annoyed of that narrative because it's just so basic and lacks nuance. The people who presented that narrative also failed to mention the pandemic issues that the TCG companies themselves acknowledged.
It’s been said elsewhere (and probably here too) but the guy’s a useful idiot to anyone savvy enough to rub his ego the right way. How else could he be fooled into buying a fake 1st Edition Base Set booster case when
everyone in the PTCG community told him to not risk it by buying it?
I'm sure Paul is causing some of the negative hype with his whole "bling bling Chingling," but it's not a crime to show off your love for Pokemon. Just check out all the financial collectors on Instagram before the pandemic started -- people like Paul have always been part of this hobby. Yes, Paul's hyping will bring in some people who are here for the wrong reasons, but in the long run there's going to be a lot more fans who find a new love for Pokemon and stick around to make our community better.
I don’t know… pre-pandemic times had things like tournament results, post-tournament articles, prerelease hype, and other non-collector things take center stage for most of the PTCG. But come pandemic times and the collector scene zarking
explodes with no possible end in sight unless TPCi prints modern sets into the ground.
And while I
used to have some respect for the collector section of the TCG fandom, the
incredibly disturbing shift from simple collecting to more investment-laden and monetary-value-obssessed collectors has made me lose it in an instant and swap it for
pure hatred.
