The Pokémon Boom Will End (But When?)

Look at this graph of Google searches for “pokemon card”…

There’s no question: interest in Pokémon cards has exploded to all-time highs!

And, with all this attention comes all-time high prices for nearly all modern sealed products.

Fusion Strike is suddenly seeing a massive surge in price, with booster boxes selling for nearly $500 USD on TCG Player. A year ago, the market price was about $150.

And, it’s not just Fusion Strike that is experiencing this kind of massive growth: Lost Origin booster boxes are now selling for $350 USD on TCG Player, compared to $140 USD in January 2024.

2024 was truly an exceptional year for Pokémon collectors and investors.

The question is:

When will this boom end?

Because, when the boom finally ends (and it always ends eventually), the consequences can be severe.

For example, Rudy from Alpha Investments once spoke about someone who messaged him asking to buy his 120 booster boxes of Vivid Voltage… which he bought for $200 USD a piece. At the time of Rudy’s video, these boxes were only worth around $100…

You can watch the entire video below, but the takeaway is this:

Holding past the end of a Pokémon boom can be devastating to your modern sealed investments.

In this video, Rudy’s advice was simple: just keep holding.

Because, he believed the prices would eventually recover, and, he wasn’t wrong: today, at the beginning of 2025, Vivid Voltage booster boxes have risen 50% in price since those lows.

But, that’s still only about $150 a booster box: a 25% loss, before fees, for this investor.

And that’s assuming they held for another 3 years to get to today!

Now, this is an extreme case: this investor built a large position near the all-time highs for that product, and held it straight the bottom of the market as Pokémon’s last boom came to an end.

But, if they understood the Collectibles Hype Cycle theory, they would have realized that by buying into a booming market, they were betting on immediate, short-term gains at best, and should have sold when Vivid Voltage hit it’s all-time highs prices near $240 a booster box.

And, given that we’re back in another booming Pokémon market, the question is not IF the boom will end.

It’s WHEN.

So we can avoid the fate of the unfortunate investor from Rudy’s video.

And, while no one can truly predict the market, we can look at history to try to anticipate what might happen to the Pokémon market over 2025 and beyond, as well as the learnings of other collectibles experts, to make better decisions with our hard-earned collecting dollars.

What We Can Learn From The 2020 Pandemic Boom

The last major boom kicked off around November 2020: right around the release of Vivid Voltage.

With people all over the world locked in their homes to stop the spread of the COVID pandemic, and (let’s face it): bored out of their minds… all kinds of at-home hobbies saw an explosion of interest. Including Pokémon cards.

It was easy to buy packs and have them safely shipped straight to your door, so you could rip them and build your collection.

The perfect pandemic hobby.

These are the circumstances that kicked off the 2020 pandemic boom.

And, as interest in Pokémon was reaching this fever pitch…

The Pokémon Company started smashing it out of the park with new set releases, starting with Shining Fates in early 2021, and culminating in BOTH Evolving Skies AND Celebrations towards the end of that same year.

The quality of those sets helped maintain significant interest in Pokémon cards to the end of 2021…

Except for one hiccup: REPRINTS.

Because, by December 2021, The Pokémon Company had released some massive waves of reprints that decimated the market for some of the sets released over the prior year, such as Chilling Reign and Vivid Voltage.

And, by January 2022, even Celebrations was widely available and cheap.

It was only Evolving Skies that had maintained enough demand to earn relatively high prices, recovering to about $140 a booster boxe by Feb 2022. (Laughably cheap by today’s standard: Evolving Skies recently exceeded a $1,000 USD market price on TCG Player!)

Chilling Reign, meanwhile, had plummeted to as low as as $79.95 as mentioned by Poke Knowledge Cards in this video.

And, as prices for these modern sealed product crashed, so did the demand for Pokémon.

Dec 2021 was the end of the Pandemic boom: 12-13 months after it started.

Despite this market reset, Pokémon cards continued to be popular: it was clear there were more Pokémon card collectors after the boom than before. A fact that gave me a lot of confidence in the future of the hobby.

And, December 2021 was really just the end of the boom for English Pokémon: modern Japanese Pokémon cards would go through a significant boom more than a year later in early 2023 that would last about another 12-13 months and end in 2024.

So, using these two examples: 12 to 13 months is looking like a possible expected timeline for a modern Pokémon boom.

What Collectibles Experts Tell Us

In his classic book, How To Make The Most From Your Investments in Antiques and Collectibles, Mr. Harry Rinker introduces the concept of cyclical collectibles markets.

And, in it, he provides the following guidance regarding the timing of a collectibles market run (his term for “boom”):

And, although our findings of 12-13 months is on the lower end, it’s remarkable how consistent his insight is with what we’ve experienced…

Especially when you consider he wrote this in 1988 based on his experience in markets many of us would find laughable today (Philadelphia Chippendale furniture? What??)

But, his experience across a variety of collectibles and antiques markets should provide a bit more comfort with the timelines we’ve seen.

What This Means For The Current Pokémon Boom

With this information in mind, I think a sensible conclusion is that the current boom will end in about 12-13 months. So it will end in:

December 2025!

But, of course: no one can predict the future! This is just my speculation based on what we’ve seen in the past, in order to help us plan our collecting and investing purchases and sales accordingly.

And, in fact, I believe there are several factors that may actually EXTEND this current boom, beyond what we’ve seen in the past, potentially aligning it more with some of the extreme multi-year booms described by Mr. Rinker.

Because, like last time, we have an exceptional lineup of Pokémon card releases to look forward to over 2025:

1. Prismatic Evolutions, releasing Jan 17, 2025,

2. Journey Together, bringing back partner’s Pokemon on Mar 28th, 2025, and, of course…

3. The Team Rocket set!

But, beyond this next year, I suspect we have a LOT to look forward to in 2026: the 30th anniversary of Pokémon.

And so, it’s very possible The Pokémon Company will be able to carry the hype through 2025 and into 2026 with whatever they have planned for Pokémon’s next major anniversary.

For example:

Pokémon Gen 10??

What I Plan To Do About It

To me, the most important takeaway from this is that, in a cyclical market, we want to make sure we’re timing our action with the current position of the market on the cycle.

And, in this booming market, I plan to capture the gains I’ve made in the sealed product investments I’ve made over the past 4 years.

I’m not interested in speculating on short-term market moves, which (knowingly or not) is what the ill-fated investor in Rudy’s video did. If you’re not planning to sell within the next 6-12 months, be careful building large new positions this year!

I have a lot of confidence that Pokémon will continue to succeed into 2026 and beyond. The 2020 pandemic boom brought a ton of new collectors into the hobby, including me, who have continued to stick around. I think this boom is the same.

I see so much organic excitement about Pokémon cards, between the number of coworkers, friends, and family who have started collecting, and the massive turnouts seen at competitive Pokémon events!

It really feels like Pokémon is in an incredible spot, and continuing to develop their long-term fan base.

But, history has still shown us that, even with organic growth like this, the prices of Pokémon cardamom investments can be extremely volatile throughout market cycles, and I expect prices to come down soon.

But that’s why I’m planning to take advantage of the high prices we’re experiencing today, and through 2025!

And, when the market finally corrects back down…

I’ll be ready to start buying again 😉

So, as always:

Thank you so much for reading the TCG Buyers Club newsletter.

My name’s Grey, I buy cardboard, and I make collecting and investing in Pokémon, simple.

Cheers 🍻