alt Hacker News>I’m referring specifically to the cards, which exploded in popularity after Logan Paul paid $5 million for a rare card in 2021.
the cards have been popular for significantly longer than 5 years.
my kid's entire class (the entire school, really) brought their binders of pokemon cards to school every day in ~2002 until the school banned pokemon cards on premise because they were such a distraction and causing issues (kids crying about unfair trades, etc.)
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Veserv • yesterday at 10:05 PM
Their popularity is a fad. You are talking about their popularity when they first released in the US. They faded significantly for at least a decade if not two until seeing a recent resurgence so massive even random corner stores carry pokemon card packs these days.
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They have long been popular, but the popularity has increased more than 5x since the pandemic. They were printing less than 2 billion a year before then [1], and are now selling more than 10 billion a year despite shortages, scalping, etc [2].
Perhaps "boom" is a better word for it than "fad". But my point is just that this demand seems to be largely driven by artifical scarcity, speculation, influencers - similar to Labubu.
And eventually prices will hit a peak and I expect we will see demand fall off rapidly.
[1] https://www.pokebeach.com/2021/06/pokemon-tcg-sold-3-7-billi...
[2] https://www.ign.com/articles/10-billion-pokemon-cards-were-p...