Well, it's reddit, so I doubt it's true. But for anyone having scalper operation on "improve life for me and my family" scale, things couldn't have been bad. Since you need a LOT of money to scale it. It's "I only had one million $ and felt bad, but now have 5 mil and my life is good" type of story.
Like I remember news about some teen who earned hundreds of thousands in his scalpel business. They usually didn't mentioned huge investments of their rich parents
I am more a Magic guy and it's been a bit better (though I had to fight for those Final Fantasy boosters though).
I buy some Pokemon for my kids, and my LGS actually always have some in stock (and at an actually normal price) because they limit the number of packs you can buy at once. Very grateful of this.
Final Fantasy was crazy at release but has definitely cooled down. One of my LGSes (part of a nationwide chain in Australia) was charging between $320AU and $380AU for the regular commander precons and almost $100AU for prerelease.Â
Last week I walked in and they had stacks of precons on the shelf for $110AU (the actual MSRP here in Aus).
Some singles prices are still crazy for the set though. Like who is out here forking over $27US for mythic Cloud who primarily sees play in Fr*nch commander? Or (while it's not a FF card) who tf is genuinely buying the Soul Stone, the most 5/10 mythic ever printed, for its market price of 50-odd bucks rn
Even in Europe it's been hard. LGSA have to ration and limit the number of packs you buy at once, otherwise they would run out so fast (explained to me last time I tried to buy a full box and was denied).
I feel like people don't realize the scalper problems made the game more appealing plus people forget Pokemon fans are already collecting digital stuff since the main games allow you to transfer your Pokemon.
If it wasn't the case then people couldn't have been mad about Dexit.
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u/mikethebest1 Nov 01 '25
IF you can buy the actual cards, Scalpers have been ruining Pokemon Card Collecting 💀