Pokémon trading cards are their own economy

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1:49IPOs, what they tell us, and what we should and should not be doing with them. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Pokemon trading card game. I'm David Amell. In the last couple of years, Pokemon cards have gone from a fun collectible card game to an entire market. There's a massive ecosystem taking place here, from casual collectors to players to bulk buyers and even Discord bot servers. The Pokemon Company recently released a 30th anniversary celebration set of the cards, which was notably different from the way that other sets have been released, both in just the sheer volume flooding the market and in the rarity of these cards.

2:35This has caused a lot of drama and sparked a lot of conversations in the community, so I wanted to bring on The Verge's Charles Pulliam Moore to talk about it. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 29th, 2026. Today's OpenAI Dev Day, one of the biggest events of the year for the company, and it kicked it off by announcing Dots, a MetaMuse competitor. OpenAI says that Dots is an always-on AI assistant that can do nearly anything across connected apps in the background while learning your preferences over time. Dots is powered by GPT-6 Astra and lives at a cloud computer, which gives it access to a web browser and over 4 ,000 supported apps.

3:16Dots will also be available in Microsoft Teams and Slack. OpenAI says soon you'll be able to interact with it over text messages as well. Next, Nothing announced its first pair of professional headphones, the Nothing Headphone One Pro. The$399 pair of over-ear headphones offers a triple driver design, AuraCast support, and a dedicated flat EQ switch which removes the audio processing. The goal here is to offer a single pair of headphones that you can use to enjoy your music as well as a profile you can use to mix your music with. John Higgins says that the active noise cancellation's not quite as good as the industry leaders, but it is the best of any nothing headphones so far.

3:53And finally, Google officially confirmed it will stop updating Chrome OS in 2034. On the one hand, it's not that big of a surprise as the company shifts its attention to Google Book OS. But on the other hand, it means that if you bought a Chromebook this year, you probably won't be getting those 10 years of software updates. Or maybe your Chromebook will just turn into a Google Book. Google has said that many Chromebooks will be capable of upgrading to Google Book OS, so hopefully more details emerge before 2034. You can read more at TheVerge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 29th, 2026.

4:29Charles Pulliam-Moore:Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Some of us are blessed with a natural ability to do gift-giving right. You probably have a few in your life. People who can make a mental ledger of what their loved ones like and buy things here and there throughout the year. My mom has always been the best gift giver in my life. She could even make the smallest gift feel incredibly special because you knew that she had really thought about that person receiving it. It doesn't have to be the biggest or the most expensive gift. It just has to show someone you were thinking about them. Well, for the rest of us, here's a tip.

5:03Charles Pulliam-Moore:Prime Big Deal Days is coming October 6th and 7th. That means that for two straight days, you can get deals on those kitchen gadgets for your dad, electronics for your brother, fitness equipment for your bestie, toys for the cousins, and so much more. There's new deals dropping every day so you can become one of those expert gift givers that we all know. And it's all happening with plenty of lead time into the holidays. So no more scrambling to come up with something last minute. The hardest part will be finding a good hiding place for it all. Mark your calendars. Shop new deals every day at this prime big deal days, October 6th and 7th.

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6:59Charles Pulliam Moore, welcome to the Vergecast.

7:02Charles Pulliam-Moore:Hello, hello. Thank you so much for having me here. So you just wrote a story on the site about the state of the Pokemon scalping ecosystem and what's happening with this 30th anniversary set. Just to set the stage here, can you explain why Pokemon cards in particular are such an insane commodity right now? I feel like I could buy these when I was a kid, but the last couple of years, it's just exploded into its own ecosystem. Yeah, I mean, you know, you bringing up you being able to buy them when you were a kid, that's part of it, right? I'm not sure how old you are exactly. But I imagine we were we were both there for the beginning of Pokemon.

7:39Charles Pulliam-Moore:What's happening right now is kind of sort of similar to what happened when the cards first like hit the streets. There were all like there was all kinds of news coverage about how popular the game was and how like cards were just out of stock. Back in the 90s, people were not so sophisticated in terms of their pursual of these things, right? It was just kind of like, all right, you're going to go to your Toys R Us or Arcadey Toys and see what happens to be in stock, and you just make do with what you've got. But now, in 2026, the Pokemon brand hasn't gone away, right? Like it has only gotten bigger and sort of more popular over the years.

8:19Charles Pulliam-Moore:And that has translated into an intense focus on the cards. Right. Um, and in 2026 in particular, in this moment in which like hustle culture has sort of evolved into this beast of a thing where everyone's sort of like looking for quick ways to make money and then encourage other people how to do it. Pokemon sort of represents like an ideal kind of commodity to sort of like pounce onto. do um i feel like every every other month we're hearing her story about like oh these these cars from the base set just sold for an exorbitant amount of money that makes absolutely no sense and some of that is because you know people have nostalgia for the cards but it's also sort of the the card collecting has kind of taken on a life of its own that is fascinating and distressing all at the same time yeah just to sort of brief people on this do you know why these decided to randomly take off when exactly did these start taking off because i feel like it was around 2020 or so but i could be mistaken here yeah um i mean pokemon has again pokemon's always been popular it's always like shades of this have always sort of been present within the pokemon fandom and within the pokemon card collecting community but i do think that the pandemic really made things worse for a number of reasons and in a number of different ways, right?

9:41Charles Pulliam-Moore:In the pandemic, people were at home and everyone was just on their computers because they couldn't go anywhere. And Pokemon's an easy way to grab attention, right? Whether it be, oh, I have some cards here and I'm going to open them on camera or like I'm going to show you the kinds of unexpected places that you might be able to buy Pokemon cards. That all really got big at point in time when everyone's attention was much more on the internet because they just weren't outside um and now you know things that the pandemic it's not over but it's you know the lockdowns are obviously relaxed we're able to go outside but this intensity has sort of not gone away it's just sort of intensified over time and now with the rise of platforms like like honestly like the rise of platforms like tick tock has kind of exacerbated it just because there are more avenues through which people can consume this kind of content.

10:37Yeah. So you're saying that there's sort of like a new market for this content's consumption, which is driving people to actually go and make it.

10:44Charles Pulliam-Moore:Yeah. Yeah. Like Pokemon's always been here. I feel like, you know, social media in 2026 has given Pokemon a new level of brand exposure to people, right? There are just more people who are aware like, oh, those games are still going on. Oh, the card game is still like a thing. I remember being in New York in like 2017 and like walking through a target and you just walk by the card selection or the card section and there would just be stacks and stacks and stacks of Pokemon cards. You could just buy them very casually, which wasn't indicative of them not being popular, but it was more that the community of people who were focused on it was much smaller.

11:22Charles Pulliam-Moore:And now it feels like more people are much more aware of the fact that like, yeah, certain pokemon cards can be very valuable there are people who are willing to spend quite a bit of money for them and in that realization people like oh i could also make some money off of this and so people have just really kind of pounced on it a lot of what we're seeing with pokemon right now it's not new um right this is this is this is like sneaker heads now like this is just how it's always been not always but it's what sneakers have been they've existed in this kind of space for a much longer time where people are willing to line up out front of uh out front of stores for hours on end just to get like a pair of jordans that they are maybe gonna wear maybe gonna wear once or twice before they flip them to someone else um sneakers there are all kinds of like difficulties with selling sneakers right like people don't have the same size feet so it's like all right like i've got like this shoe in a size eight so maybe you know i can i can flip that but with pokemon cards it's just kind of like it's just the card right um there we don't have to get into the whole like uh ecosystem of like grading and stuff because that's its own kind of thing probably it's on verge cast yeah yeah but it's like oh you pull you know this lugia card and you know that like it's worth a few hundred dollars and so the goal is to like buy up as much product as you can maybe pull that card flip it or you sell that product um with the uh intention being like you are looking to get this into the hands of people who are trying to like chase that thing yeah i want to get into that because i think we've all seen a lot of people taking videos of target store openings right it'll be like 7 a.m or 8 a.m there's a line of people outside of a target they're rushing in trying to grab as much product as they can what's the deal with that are they like just reselling as many cards as they can in unopened or are they ripping them open and then trying to sell the rare cards what's generally happening there it varies um i've gone to a couple of these like i don't want to call it like a lineup event like i've i've been standing out in front of a best buy you know before it opens just to get my hands on some cards because it's almost impossible to buy them online at this point uh it's it's brick and mortar stores tend to be sort of like your best bet to like get something and uh just having conversations with those people it's a multitude of different types of folks who are doing this some of them are um scalpers resellers uh some of them are just like casual fans like myself um i've got a huge collection and i just you know i i have them to to look at them you know i'm not a competitive player or anything um it it's it's a mix right uh i think weirdly enough the let's line up in front of a store of it all where does that come from.

14:14Charles Pulliam-Moore:Some of it is like sneakerhead culture, but like a lot of it, I feel like got popularized by Apple, right? Like with iPhone launches, like I don't think people, Apple's gotten better about, um, making sure that they have adequate stock to deal with, you know, the people who actually want to get the phone. But in those early days, it was a thing that people did for fun. It's like, I'm going to be, I'm, we're going to camp outside of the Apple store to get the thing. And that was the apple of it all. That felt very much sort of like an event of sorts, right? It was something that people treat it like a fun thing to do.

14:50Charles Pulliam-Moore:Whereas with Pokemon cards, it's more sort of like get there early, get your stuff, go home and do with it what you will. Yeah, well, a lot of these people are basically scalping these cards, right? So I want to talk about the scalper ecosystem a little bit here. Let's talk about them. In your piece, you sort of mentioned that there are these Discord channels that you can pay for that will give you access to scalping bots that can basically automatically buy a ton of different packs online as soon as they release. Can you talk a little bit more about that ecosystem and how that's evolved over time?

15:22Yeah.

15:23Charles Pulliam-Moore:So like I mentioned earlier, buying things online is very difficult in large part because the reseller economy has sort of adopted these tools that make it easy for them to accumulate product like in bulk in a way that like your average person can't. So when you hear people talking about bots, what they're talking about are automated programs that basically, how to put this they brute force their way uh through sales where it's sort of like the bot will continuously try to add something to a cart and then check out um they are programmed to have access to your credit card uh which is usually how to put this they usually use virtual credit cards so you come up with like a fake credit card number that's actually attached to a real credit card that fake credit card is attached to a fake account because a lot of these retailers what they do is um they do take some uh steps to prevent this kind of behavior like if they see too many orders coming from a certain ip address or from a singular account they'll be like nah you clearly aren't a person who's just buying this for yourself you are trying to accumulate stuff but what these bots do is they make it really easy for you to pretend that you are multiple people um and sort of source all of this to yourself.

16:44Charles Pulliam-Moore:And so these resellers frequently use these tools in order to buy up all of this stuff. In addition to those tools, they will commonly congregate in Discord servers where they have automated pings that are designed to let you know when like a certain product has been loaded into a store's backend. Target is known for doing drops at like three in the morning for or whatever reason. And if you are interested in this kind of stuff, you find a couple of these discords, they're like buzzing around like, like 12 to two 30. People are just like chomping at a bit, foaming at the mouth, ready to like pounce, pounce, pounce, pounce, pounce.

17:22Charles Pulliam-Moore:Notifications go off, they activate their bots and they will just secure multiple orders in order to get this stuff for themselves. After they acquire it, um, oftentimes the sites will cancel some of their orders, but usually the more of these things that you're using, you are upping your chances of getting a successful sale. After they acquire it, they usually end up flipping it, um, to a number of different kinds of people. Sometimes it's to individual people. Um, it'll be, you know, a collector who missed out on like a site's, uh, sale. And so they'll come to one of these resellers knowing that they're going to have to pay, you know, anywhere between double to triple the price, like the MSRP.

18:06Charles Pulliam-Moore:Um, but oftentimes these resellers go and sell things to card shops. They sell to card shops or, uh, they will take them to card shows all with the intention of like offloading it for much, much more. It's never, they're never trying to break even. It's always about trying to make a profit, which means that all the prices are ridiculous. Um, And it's just kind of just kind of makes the whole the whole collecting hobby very non-repe. Right. So there's multiple middlemen here, right? There's the discord servers that are selling access to the bots. There's the people buying them. There's people reselling them.

18:44There's different types of resale. There's individual cards. There's whole sets.

18:48Charles Pulliam-Moore:Yeah. And the thing that's fascinating about the discords, you know, I get into this thing with the piece. The people who are in these discords are obviously interested in reselling. Like that is a particular kind of like money that they are trying to make. But the people running the discords will often treat it like a subscription service where it's like, if you pay us, you know,$75 a month or$600 a year, we will give you access to all of these tools. We'll teach you how to do it. right so the people running the discords the discord in and of itself is a business right like that is a revenue generator for them yeah which is fascinating um i think that's that's that's like oh well done but also like oh my god you guys this is another middleman yeah yeah at t-mobile the new iphone 18 pro is here with a big leap in battery life and you can get it on us.

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20:34Charles Pulliam-Moore:Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Some of us are blessed with a natural ability to do gift giving right. You probably have a few in your life. People who can make a mental ledger of what their loved ones like and buy things here and there throughout the year. My mom has always been the best gift giver in my life. She could even make the smallest gift feel incredibly special because you knew that she had really thought about that person receiving it. It doesn't have to be the biggest or the most expensive gift. It just has to show someone you were thinking about them. Well, for the rest of us, here's a tip.

21:09Charles Pulliam-Moore:Prime Big Deal Days is coming October 6th and 7th. That means that for two straight days, you can get deals on those kitchen gadgets for your dad, electronics for your brother, fitness equipment for your bestie, toys for the cousins, and so much more. There's new deals dropping every day so you can become one of those expert gift givers that we all know. And it's all happening with plenty of lead time into the holidays. so no more scrambling to come up with something less minute. The hardest part will be finding a good hiding place for it all. Mark your calendars. Shop new deals every day at this prime big deal days, October 6th and 7th.

21:51I want to get into this 30th anniversary set that just dropped recently. It seems a little bit notably different from the way that other sets have gone. You know, at other sets, it's like there's all these unique cards and they haven't been printed before. But now there is all these sort of original cards that are being reprinted for 30th anniversary. As well, it seems that there are just a lot more cards being printed in general, right? What is the drama going on with this 30th anniversary set?

22:18Charles Pulliam-Moore:So the 30th anniversary drama is... So there have been anniversary sets before. I wrote about this back in whatever five years ago it was for the 20th, for the 25th set, where the big chases were Charizard is always a chase, regardless of whether it's original or like a new one. But they reprinted the Charizard, Venusaur and Blastoise cards from that base set. And everyone was like, oh, my goodness, like Charizard is one of the Charizard is consistently one of those cards that, you know, auctions off for crazy amounts of money. And so people were really sort of dead set on trying to get their hands on the 25th set.

22:59Charles Pulliam-Moore:Charizard is that same Charizard card is once again back in this new set. What is different about this more so than anything else, it does feel like the culture that exists around it is the thing that's really changed, right? Because while the 25th anniversary set was still a little hard to get your hands on, you could still just walk into a store and find it pretty easily. You might have to check a few stores, but it would usually be there. What's different now, it just feels like this reselling economy has really just blown up in a way that has made shortages feel huge to people. The Pokemon company has tried to take steps to mitigate this, right?

23:40Charles Pulliam-Moore:Because this is not unique to the 30th Celebration set. 30th Celebration, I think, gets into a lot of people's heads because they're not necessarily following it very closely. every pokemon set that drops has had shortages like this because of the reselling economy um the pokemon company what have they done they have instituted all kinds of on-site measures to try to keep you to try to keep resellers from being able to get through they've got this queue system that's really uh there's a queue system and there is a really aggressive uh are you a robot sort of system that like i i can't buy cards from the pokemon center on my home computer because my IP address has been flagged as like, there was suspicious behavior.

24:21Charles Pulliam-Moore:The suspicious behavior was me like refreshing a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Um, but in addition to the things that they've done on the website, the, uh, the Pokemon company has also upped, um, production for these things. Uh, I think this is the second year in a row that they've printed something like 10 billion, uh, cards globally um and that's you know cards uh in multiple languages these are uh these we're not just specifically speaking about cards printed in english that are printed in english-speaking countries like everywhere that pokemon cards are sold um i don't necessarily know that the reselling problem is so huge in other countries but the company has sensed that this is so much of a problem that we need to be printing more even with that increased capacity though uh we're still seeing this being an issue, which is, it's tough, right?

25:14Charles Pulliam-Moore:Obviously, I imagine that the Pokemon company does not like this being attached to their product, right? I'm sure they love the sales, right? Because at the end of the day, they win, the product is bought, it's not being stolen per se. And so they're just sort of like, great, but it isn't a good look when a game, a card game that is aimed at children is inaccessible to children because of unethically behaving adults. Yeah, I was going to ask you about this because a lot of people would make the argument, including a lot of these scalpers, that they're actually doing Nintendo a favor by making sure that they sell out of every single card that they print, right?

25:57It's a function of supply and demand. And if you have limited supply, there will always be demand. And so what do you think of those claims that people are making? Obviously, the scalpers are going to say this because they just want to keep scalping. But what incentive really does Nintendo have to make more cards besides the look of it not getting into the hands of enough kids?

26:19Charles Pulliam-Moore:I mean, I think the more that they increase production, the more sales there are going to be. I don't know how much the Pokemon company would have to be printing in order to fully stamp this problem out, right? There are a few different solutions that they could take to try to address the issue. Printing more rare cards is the easiest, right? Like, you flood the market with these things, and then they're value tanks, right? Yeah. Is that good for Nintendo or bad for Nintendo if they're value tanks? I don't think it. I think it's neutral for Nintendo. right because the value of a card doesn't really have any direct impact on nintendo's bottom line they're just sort of like thank you so much for buying this pack of cards the contents don't really mean all that much to us because we have your money but you could note that like if people are chasing a certain rarity of a card then they're going to be more willing to buy more cards right i think that's true that's true to a point um as much as people sort of fixate on the idea like I'm the only one that has this.

27:19Charles Pulliam-Moore:I don't think that cards dropping in rarity would actually stop people from buying Pokemon cards in mass. Yeah. Uh, just cause they're, they're, they're cool. Um, you know, the resellers were like, we're doing you a favor. Baby, I want to hold your hand when I say this Pokemon doesn't need help. They are, they are, they are one of the most durable and popular pieces of ip of all time and um you know your discord it's it's yes it's contributing but uh the the business would be flourishing without that input right right there's a couple of weird new types of businesses that have popped up around this and you noted earlier that this probably started with like tiktok live and tiktok shop there's services like whatnot where people will they will open pokemon cards for customers that bought the pack live on like a live stream can you tell me about this what exactly is the draw here so whatnot is how was i describing it to my boyfriend earlier whatnot is like the unholy cross between tiktok ebay and qvc right all rolled into one where it's sort of like hey come watch me open stuff uh you can pay for a certain amount of the stuff that i open so the way that uh ripper it's called like ribbon ship uh that's the that's the the general term for it people will buy a box of pokemon cards uh and usually organize them into like little sections unopened where it's like here's columns one two and three you the viewer have the ability to purchase a certain amount of cards so you can be like i want two packs from row a or row one three packs from you know what I mean you can do that and then the person who is hosting the live stream will then rip them open with the idea being that everyone who is watching is sort of like getting in on the dopamine hit of like oh you're opening some packs what's going to come out and the person who has purchased or purchased the dibs or the rights to that pack then is supposed to receive the cards that are ripped on stream so the person who has been paid is meant to ship these things out um i don't love it i think it's very what are we doing here um but it's a thing that people do um and as scummy as it sounds it gets even scummier when you watch it uh in particular because there are i get into this in the piece there are so many videos of people on these live streams clearly just like trying to scam people they'll be ripping a card and they will see because if you open a pack of pokemon cards if you aren't careful you can give yourself a little peek at what uh the rare card is in the back they usually occupy a specific slot within the pack um there's a i can't do it myself but there's a way that when you open a pack you can shuffle the cards around so that the rare card is like the last one oftentimes these rip and ship people they won't do that they'll just like open it up and you know start showing you one two three There's so many videos where you see people, oh, that's like the chase card of the set that someone has bought for like$5, right?

30:36Charles Pulliam-Moore:The person on camera will then, you know, ooh, and do some finagling off screen to bring the cards back and be like, oh, wow, the rare card in this pack was a not so rare card. Whoops. It's very, it's ridiculous because everybody can see it. You know what I mean? You would think that if you were, if you're really committed to scamming, you would find a better way to do this. You'd develop your sleight of hand skills a little bit so that your thievery wouldn't be so obvious. Do people have any recourse in this? Because I feel like if people don't trust that system, the entire marketplace falls apart.