Opinion: Millennials Would Be Able to Afford Homes If They Didn’t Let Older Kids Trick Them Into Giving Up Their Most Valuable Pokémon Cards

I had a 1999 Pokémon Base Set Shadowless 1st Edition Holo Charizard and I left it out on the table at lunch one day and it was stolen by Andrew Carnegie who used the funds to become a railroad tycoon.

Fuckin' capitalism man.

Didn't get tricked myself, but rather my parents did by buying into the religious zealotry and claimed "pocket monsters are demonic" and throwing away my whole collection after listening to another parent.

This was all pre 2010 so basically had the golden era of cards en masse. Like binders and binders of holos. The few key cards I remember, looked up on TCG the other week. $4-500 per card for some of my over collected sets.

I still cry.

Man,why the personal attack? I traded a charizard that was worth like $50 to $100 for some gen2 foil, I'm afraid of checking what that charizard is worth today

Yeah, I had several dual lands from unlimited that kids in 4th grade traded me hot garbage for back then they were worth $20. Now they're what, hundreds? thousands?

I own several unopened Japanese booster packs from the original 151

Ladies, please contain yourselves.

6 years ago I got about 70 dollars on my limited pokemon card collection from when I was a kid (like 2000-2001 era) with only a few good ones. I'm pretty damn sure I spent more on the starter box + other packs combined than that lol. On the other hand, I actually used part of that money for a new graphics card, so it was in general a pretty good time.

I know this is The Onion, but I just wanted to share. I can't imagine anyone making any actual money off these things unless they have been playing speculative investment from card #1 and never bought a pack in their life. Yet people do seem to talk about the card game as if it's some lucrative thing. 🤷

P.S. as an aside, did anyone else have any difficulty getting the right group of friends who actually cared about playing the cards instead of collecting them? I had maybe one friend who liked playing the card game as it was, but we had to make a special rule about evolutions because we didn't have enough cards to make it make sense (Something about playing certain energy cards to sacrifice an introduction of a evolution directly, I can't remember exactly how we did it or if it was any good at all.)

Wait are old pokemon cards actually valuable? I probably still have some somewhere at my parents house...

I only played the Red and Blue version for Gameboy. That was years ago. Never touched the series after they started marketing for kids. I was in 7th or 8th grade when it dropped. The original stuff was pretty great!

Mine probably would be worth something, however they were stolen in the 3rd grade by a classmate. Those were Japanese cards from about a year before they started making the English cards. However if they weren't stolen, and I still had them, their condition would probably be 2/10 because I was taking them everywhere. So worthless based on condition.

I traded my Gyarados for a Snubbull, because it was a new Pokémon that I've never heard of before. This was around the time Gen 2 just came out and I didn't know about it, so I thought it was super special. Regret it to this day ;-;