It’s still basically impossible to just walk into a GameStop or Walmart and buy new booster packs from recent sets like a normal person. Unless you want to pay ridiculous prices or sift through resellers online, your best bet is still to go out and line up outside the store on restock day. Or to go do crimes. A shocking number of people are settling for the latter, and often with very unsettling and even violent results.
“We’re aware that some fans are experiencing difficulties purchasing certain Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) products due to very high demand impacting availability,” the company said in a statement a year ago. “We understand this inconvenience can be disappointing for fans, and we are actively working to print more of the impacted Pokémon TCG products as quickly as possible and at maximum capacity to acknowledge this.”
Will the Pokémon Company ever get a handle on growing demand, or will it take a market crash to scare away all the scalpers and restore some sense of calm and kindness to the hobby? Will 15 billion cards be enough? 20 billion? Or should we start instituting ID checks for packs of cardboard like they’re thinking about doing in Japan?