It took Pokemon 25 years to print its first 34 billion cards. The last five years added 51 billion. Sixty percent of every card that exists was made since 2021, and the fear is obvious: print that much and prices should collapse.

Baseball cards did exactly that in the late 80s and early 90s, when companies printed cards by the billion, demand disappeared, and most of it is worthless 35 years later. Collectors call that the junk wax era, and a lot of people expect Pokemon to be the sequel.

So I checked the prices. Every booster box and ETB in my database with two plus years of history, 154 products, monthly TCGplayer medians from 2021 to June 2026, sorted by the era the boxes were made in. Chart attached. The eras printed during the boom are at the top, the low-print eras from the 2000s are at the bottom.

The strict version, same months for every box (June 2022 to June 2026): Sword & Shield era boxes returned a median 6.02x. Base through EX era, printed when the lifetime total was still around 14 billion cards, returned 2.36x. Reran it from Jan 2023 and June 2023, the gap holds every time.

Where the losses actually are: four boxes out of 154 are below entry, and all four are five figure vintage boxes (Emerald, Majestic Dawn, Crystal Guardians, Holon Phantoms). Zero modern boxes. The modern losses people expect live in one place only, the pre-release window. Thirteen products entered at hype prices and were 40 to 90 percent cheaper at retail a month later. Twilight Masquerade PC ETB: $556 pre-order, $58 on shelves, $186 today.

My read: last year's 10 billion cards are supply for sets in print now. They don't add a single box to the pool of retired sealed sets, which is where all of that growth sits. I can't separate "printing doesn't hurt" from "demand outran everything", and I don't need to. The claim was that print volume predicts price damage. Five years of prices say no.

Limits: this is through June 2026, the new 1.27M sq ft plant goes full scale in 2028, and per-set print runs aren't published, so "era" means when a box was made, not a counted run. Method and losers table in the link.

You've probably seen this kind of comparison made before. However, a lot of articles or infographics tend to use the Base Set as the comparison point or fall into survivorship bias, making the numbers look much better than they actually are.

The S&P 500 is often used as a benchmark for long-term investing. But how do Pokémon cards compare over the same five-year period?

Over the last five years, the median single card returned 38%. That is the median across 8,881 raw single cards. The S&P 500 returned 81%.

If you only look at the top 3 chase cards from each set, singles performed far better.

• All singles: median +38% (8,881 cards)

• Top 3 chase cards: median +142% (342 cards), with 84% of them up

The "top 3" were defined using only June 2021 prices. They are the three most expensive cards in each set at that point, so the selection uses nothing that happened afterward. Even among those chase cards, the worst 10% still lost 32%.

What surprised me:

Sealed products: median +238% (90 products), with 94% of them up.

Sealed is where it gets interesting. Not because it outperformed. Most people here probably expected that. It's because of the downside.

The worst-performing sealed products still gained 31%.

The worst-performing singles lost 70%.

That was the biggest finding. Not that sealed products produced higher returns, but that the downside looked completely different.

One thing I'll mention before someone else does. Sealed also had a larger maximum drawdown. It fell 32% at its worst point versus 25% for the S&P. So sealed was remarkably consistent across products while still being rough between months. Both can be true.

Full methodology, charts, and statistics are in the first comment below.

I spent some time going through PSA's public population report for every English Pokémon in my database. I wanted to answer one simple question: how often does a card actually come back as a PSA 10?

The first thing that surprised me was this.

1999 cards come back a PSA 10 10.2% of the time.

2010 cards come back a PSA 10 4.0% of the time.

I expected older cards to be harder to gem. It isn't that simple.

By print year:

1999: 10.2% (1,854,083 submissions)

2003: 14.7%

2007: 5.0%

2010: 4.0%

2013: 6.1%

2016: 21.7%

2019: 50.2%

2020: 61.1%

2023: 33.1%

2026: 62.1%

The average across everything is 32.1%, but I don't think it tells you much. The different eras behave nothing alike.

Two things are important before reading too much into these numbers.

First, this only counts cards that somebody thought were worth grading. Nobody pays a grading fee on a card with a crease down the middle. A clean-looking 1999 holo had already survived nearly three decades before it ever reached PSA, so those older cards are already a filtered group.

Second, the report can't tell who was careful before sending cards in. Someone checking centring and surface under a bright light is going to do better than someone mailing a stack and hoping.

The hardest sets with at least 10,000 submissions were:

Double Crisis (2015): 0.6%

DP Black Star Promos (2007): 1.1%

Neo Genesis (2000): 3.3%

Secret Wonders (2007): 3.4%

HeartGold & SoulSilver (2010): 4.0%

The easiest were:

Darkness Ablaze (2020): 68.7%

Champion's Path (2020): 65.6%

Silver Tempest Trainer Gallery (2022): 63.3%

Evolving Skies (2021): 59.4%

The single toughest card I found was Neo Genesis Lugia.

11,559 submissions.

15 PSA 10s.

That's 0.1%, or about one in 771.

The Charizard comparison is just as wild.

Base Set Charizard has been submitted 99,447 times and come back a PSA 10 only 486 times. That's 0.5%.

The same artwork was reprinted in Celebrations in 2021. That version has been submitted 57,500 times and come back a PSA 10 34,411 times.

My guess is that part of the dip from about 2006 to 2013 comes from the cards themselves. The foil from the Diamond & Pearl and HeartGold & SoulSilver years seems to scratch and chip easily, and those cards spent years being played instead of protected. Cards from 1999 that were treated the same way mostly never made it to PSA in the first place.

Neo Genesis has another problem. It's well known for left-heavy centring, and the cosmos holo scratches very easily.

HeartGold & SoulSilver is the one I can't explain. It's usually talked about as one of the better-printed eras, but it still comes out at 4.0% here. I'd rather leave that as an open question than make up a reason.

This is English cards only.

Does anyone here have a PSA 10 from one of the harder eras? Neo Genesis, Secret Wonders, DP Black Star, HeartGold & SoulSilver. I'd genuinely like to see one.

Full methodology and the article in the comments.

About two weeks ago, I posted in this sub looking for beta testers. Fast forward to today, and the app is now live!

Thanks to everyone who downloaded the app and has been opening it every single day. I really appreciate the support. I hope your own app was accepted too, and I wish you all the best.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. This was my first time launching an app on the Play Store, so I'm happy to share what I learned.

I posted a raw vs graded vs sealed study here a few days ago. A comment I got was: does the rarity itself actually matter? So I split every raw single I track by the exact rarity printed on the card.

January 2021 to June 2026 (The window includes the rise and the full crash)

To qualify:

At least 15 tracked sales in the last 180 days

At least $20 raw (a floor, no upper cap)

Continuous monthly history (no gaps)

Every card that passed the criteria is included. None picked by hand: 1,238 raw singles across 10 rarities. One print variant per card.

"Peak" means each card's own high, not its release week.

Calmar ratio in the chart (yearly return over the worst drawdown. Higher is better).

The rainbow rare, one of the top modern pulls and the priciest single you can pull, finished last out of the ten. A plain holo EX beat it by more than 2 to 1.

The order doesn't follow the rarity ladder. It follows age. The vintage tiers take most of the top spots, and the one purely modern pull, the rainbow, sits at the bottom.

The same Charizard makes it plain: the Gold Star from 2006 did +38.5%/yr, the Rainbow GX from 2017 did -4.4%/yr. Same card, eleven years apart.

One thing to be exact about: the rainbow came last on return, not on the fall. Its 57% drop was actually smaller than a common's 69%. It didn't crash harder; it just never grew.

The modern chase mechanics (V, VMAX, ex) barely register. As raw singles, most trade under $20, so they never cleared the floor.

Full methodology in the comment.

I posted a drawdown study here a few days back and a valid pushback was about the cards chosen: "investors don't buy random bulk". So I reran it properly: raw singles vs PSA 10 vs sealed, same five years, same rules.

January 2021 to June 2026. The window includes the rise and full crash.

To qualify:

At least 15 tracked sales in the last 180 days

At least $20 raw (a floor, no upper cap)

Continuous monthly history (no gaps)

Every card that passed the criteria is included. None picked by hand: 1,238 raw cards, 426 PSA 10s and 391 sealed products. One print variant per card.

"Peak" means each asset's own high, not its release week.

I use the Calmar ratio below to compare the results. (Calmar ratio = yearly return compared to the worst drawdown. Higher is better: more return for less pain.)

Scoreboard, medians per asset:

Sealed: +32.8%/yr, worst fall -29.7%, Calmar 1.11

Raw NM: +17.9%/yr, worst fall -60.0%, Calmar 0.30

PSA 10: +14.9%/yr, worst fall -62.3%, Calmar 0.24

Sealed won every metric I measured. About 3.7x the risk-adjusted return of raw and 4.6x PSA 10s. PSA 10s were smoother month to month than raw (48% vs 76% volatility), but they fell further during the crash.

The biggest surprise wasn't sealed.

The median raw card lost 60% from its peak. A diversified basket of all 1,238 raw cards never lost more than 12%.

Both can be true: cards crashed on different schedules, so the basket never had all its worst moments at once. Diversification definitely pays off with raw cards. PSA 10s didn't: they crashed together (one grading boom, one shared bust), and the graded basket went -37% deep and spent about four years underwater.

Second surprise: "vintage is safest" finished last. Calmar by era for raw singles: 2008-2016 era 0.45, EX era 0.36, modern 0.22, vintage 1999-2002 at 0.17. Same ranking for PSA 10s. Base Set Charizard raw did +5%/yr with a -67% fall along the way.

Inside sealed it wasn't uniform either. Blisters, premium collections and booster boxes carried the whole advantage (Calmar 1.9 / 1.8 / 1.5). Loose booster packs behaved like half a single: 0.58, with -49% falls.

Limitations: one window, one crash, one recovery. Sealed has survivorship bias, and fees/shipping are not included.

Full methodology in the comment

The cards and sealed products that went 10x get all the attention, so I wanted to look at the other side of the market.

I pulled every ungraded card with a complete monthly price history from 2021 through today (1,267 cards total) and measured how far each one fell from its peak after the 2021 Pokémon market crash.

Here's what I found:

• The median card dropped 60% from its high, which makes it the biggest Pokémon crash ever in terms of absolute dollar volume lost.

• The surprising part was how long it took for most cards to recover. The median card spent about 84% of the past five years below its previous peak, hitting its lowest point around 51% below ATH in mid-2024.

• Some eras held up much better than others. EX-era cards (2003-2007) had the smallest median decline at 45%, while modern cards (2017+) were hit the hardest at around 65%.

• What surprised me most was that even the best-performing 10% of cards still fell around 36%. Very few cards were unaffected.

Did you take advantage of the crash to buy more, or did you end up selling?

Methodology: Monthly Near Mint ungraded prices from PriceCharting, January 2021 to April 2026. Sample includes the 1,267 cards with complete price history across the full period. Drawdown was measured individually for each card from its own peak to its own trough.

I wrote up the full analysis (with charts) here if anyone wants to dig into the methodology:

https://tcginvest.io/blog/how-risky-are-pokemon-cards

GameStop pre-selling the 30th Anniversary line at 3x MSRP. The Ultra-Premium Collection at $599.99 against a $179.99 MSRP, ETBs at $149.99 against $49.99, with a max buy limit of 2 and requiring down payments. The usual take is, "GameStop became the scalper."

I think that framing misses what's actually happening, because the open market is already above GameStop. TCGplayer pre-order asks for the UPC are sitting around $1,480 right now. Those are asking prices on a box that doesn't ship until November, not sales, so call it a ceiling. But even the cheapest listings are nowhere near $180.

So why would anyone pay 3x or 8x for an unopened box? Because of what happened last time.

I posted the Celebrations numbers here a few days ago: the 25th Anniversary UPC went from $119.99 at retail to around $1,232 today, about 10x, in just under 5 years. The ETB did about 7.7x. Everyone who missed that run remembers missing it. That FOMO feeling is giving companies leverage to increase their asking prices.

That's what $600 at GameStop actually is. It's not a random markup, it's the Celebrations trajectory priced in before release day. GameStop knows it, the pre-order flippers know it, and the buyers paying it know it too.

Whether that's smart is a different question, and there's a real counterargument: the 30th is expected to have a much larger print run than Celebrations, and paying 3x retail up front eats most of the upside that made Celebrations sealed work in the first place. If you buy at $600, you need the 10x story to repeat with a much bigger supply just to get the same multiple.

The part I find genuinely new is that none of this used to happen before release. Price discovery started when packs got opened. This time, the market settled on a price two months early, and the printed MSRP was irrelevant before a single box existed.

Curious where people land: is $600 pricing in history, or are people paying for a rerun that a bigger print run can't deliver?

(Numbers: leaked GameStop sheet + Pokémon.com/distributor MSRPs, Kotaku's markup reporting, TCGplayer listings July 3, Celebrations history via PriceCharting through June 2026.)

We grade every card S+ to D on structural quality and investment potential. If you want to see where a card you're holding actually lands, it's all here: https://tcginvest.io

I pulled 180 days of actual PSA sold prices across 1,959 liquid graded cards to check (each one needed at least 3 real PSA 10 sales, 3 real PSA 9 sales, and a $5+ raw price, so no thin one-offs). The median modern PSA 9 clears about $10 over its raw copy. The median vintage 9 clears about $84.

The data is consistent with a simple explanation: modern alt arts and SIRs are pulled pristine, in huge numbers, and graded immediately, so PSA 9s are abundant and the raw copies are already near mint. Anyone who wants the card can buy a sharp raw for almost the same money. The premium that used to attach to "graded" now attaches mostly to "perfect": the median PSA 10 sells for 5.4x its own PSA 9.

The timing makes it worse. PSA just paused all four Value tiers, so the cheapest slot is now Regular at $79.99 a card. The 90% figure is measured against the old ~$19 fee. At today's ~$80 entry point, the economics are even less favorable.

To be clear about what this is and is not. It is about financial value, the slab versus the raw card plus fee. If you grade to authenticate, protect, or consign to PWCC, none of this applies and you should keep doing it. But if you are grading a modern card to make it worth more, you are betting almost entirely on the 10.

One thing from the last time I posted something like this: a bunch of skilled graders pushed back with "I make good money at this, your stat is misleading." Fair, and it is genuinely not a contradiction. This measures what a PSA 9 is worth on the open market versus the raw card plus the fee, the baseline a random 9 sells into. It is not measuring your pregrading edge or your gem rate. If you can read centering and surface well enough to hit 10s consistently, you beat that baseline, because the value is in the 10, which is the whole point. The number is for the person who assumes a 9 is a safe floor, not the person skilled enough to avoid landing one.

Easy to verify: pull any modern Special Illustration Rare's PSA 9 sold median and compare it to the raw card plus a realistic grading fee.

The hobby keeps arguing about a bubble: that nothing since 2021 is really rare, that a wave of supply is coming, that modern is a junk-wax era waiting to happen. It's a fair worry. But it's also testable, because we don't have to guess what happens when a Pokémon bubble bursts. The last one already burst, so I went and measured what came back.

​

I took 10,639 cards that were valuable PSA 10s in 2021 (real English PSA 10 sold prices, one grade, each printing tracked on its own, nothing blended across language or condition) and checked each against what it sells for now. 69.2% have recovered to their 2021 level or higher, 30.8% are still underwater five years on. But that average hides the interesting part: which cards came back, and which stayed stuck. So I tested every obvious answer one at a time.

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Rarity first, the thing everyone reaches for. Hold it constant and look inside each tier and the same rarity label gives opposite outcomes: a Rare Ultra recovered 89% of the time or 35%, depending on something that has nothing to do with the word "Ultra." Then price: raise the floor to $25, $50, $100 and the gap doesn't close, it holds firm. Then popularity, the chase mons: that one's partly right, a Charizard or an Eeveelution recovered better in both eras. But it turned out to be half the story, not the whole thing.

​

The variable that actually survived was when the card was printed:

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- Vintage (1999 to 2010): 77% recovered

- Middle era (2011 to 2016): 73%

- Late pre-boom (2017 to 2019): 59%

- Boom-era (2020 to 2021): 31%

​

A gentle drift down through the pre-boom years, then a cliff at the boom. Year by year it's even cleaner: 2017 was 53%, 2018 was 60%, 2019 was 62%, then 2020 dropped to 24% and 2021 to 36%. And it's not just old Base Set padding the top: even the newest pre-boom sets (Sun & Moon, 2017 to 2019) recovered 59%, nearly double the boom era's 31%.

​

The way I read it: a card came back if its demand existed before the bubble. Either the card itself predates the boom (it had already found its real level by 2019, so the mania was just a spike on top of a floor that was still there afterward), or the Pokémon is a permanent chase whose demand predates every boom. That's why a chase card printed during the boom still behaved more like an old card than its boom-era neighbors. The cards that stayed dead were the ones with neither, a new card and an ordinary subject, whose whole demand was manufactured inside the mania and vanished with it.

​

So characterizing the last burst, not predicting the next: what clawed back wasn't the rarest, the priciest, or the most hyped. It was the cards whose demand existed before the mania, old cards and the handful of Pokémon people never stop wanting. Curious whether this matches what you've all seen. Anyone been sitting on a 2020 to 2021 chase card that's still nowhere near where it was, or an older one that quietly came all the way back?

The hobby is arguing about a bubble again: that nothing made since 2021 is really rare, that a wave of supply is coming, that modern is a junk-wax era waiting to happen. It's a fair worry. But it's also a testable one, because we don't have to guess what happens when a Pokémon bubble bursts. The last one already burst, so I measured what came back.

​

The method first, because it's the reason you can trust the answer. I used PSA 10 sold-price history from PriceCharting: actual completed sales, one specific grade, English only, each printing tracked separately (normal, reverse-holo and 1st-edition versions never blended into each other). No Cardmarket "Price Trend," which averages every language and condition into one figure that describes nothing real. Included: every card whose PSA 10 averaged at least $25 across all of 2021, the cards that actually mattered at the top. I used the full-year 2021 average on purpose, not the all-time high, so I'm not committing the circular error of "cards that peaked in 2021 are below their peak." 10,639 cards, 10,555 of them with a current 2026 price. Recovered = current PSA 10 price at or above its 2021 average.

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69.2% recovered, 30.8% still underwater. Then I sorted recovered-vs-underwater by one variable at a time to see which trait actually separated survivors from stuck.

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Candidate 1, rarity. Hold rarity constant and look inside each tier. Same label, opposite outcome:

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Pre-boom vs boom-era recovery, by rarity:

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Rare Holo: 87% vs 37%

Rare Ultra: 89% vs 35%

Rare Rainbow: 96% vs 21%

Rare Secret: 71% vs 2%

​

A Rare Ultra recovered 89% or 35% depending on something that has nothing to do with the word "Ultra." Rarity isn't the driver.

​

Candidate 2, price. Raise the floor and re-check:

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- At $25 raw: 73% pre-boom vs 31% boom-era

- At $50: 77% vs 25%

- At $100: 79% vs 27%

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The gap holds firm. Honest note: above $250 the boom-era sample shrinks to 32 cards and the gap narrows, but at 32 cards that's noise, not a reversal. Through the dense range, price is ruled out.

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Candidate 3, popularity. This one is partly right. Split by perennial chase Pokémon (Charizard, Pikachu, the Eeveelutions, Rayquaza, Mewtwo, Lugia, Gengar and a few others) vs everything else: a chase boom-era card recovered 75% of the time vs 28% for an ordinary one. Popularity clearly helps. (That boom-era chase cell is 63 cards: directional, not gospel. But the same direction shows in the much larger pre-boom row, which is why I trust the pattern.) So "which Pokémon" isn't ruled out. It's the second half of the answer.

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The variable that survived: print era, the set release year.

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Recovery by print era, with sample size:

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Vintage (1999 to 2010): 77%, n=5,446

Middle era (2011 to 2016): 73%, n=2,711

Late pre-boom (2017 to 2019): 59%, n=1,525

Boom-era (2020 to 2021): 31%, n=957

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Year by year: 2017 was 53%, 2018 was 60%, 2019 was 62%, then 2020 was 24% and 2021 was 36%. Even the newest pre-boom sets (Sun & Moon) recovered 59%, nearly double the boom era. And I ran all four variables jointly in one model: print era stayed by far the strongest signal (a boom-era card had less than one-eighth the recovery odds of a pre-boom card, holding price, rarity and popularity constant), while price on its own carried no independent power once era was in. One-at-a-time and all-at-once agree.

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The reading: a card recovered if its demand existed before the bubble. Either the card predates the boom (it found its real level by 2019, so the mania was a spike on top of a floor that was still there afterward), or the Pokémon is a permanent chase (its demand predates all booms). The cards that stayed dead had neither, new card plus ordinary subject, demand manufactured inside the mania and gone with it. That boom-era-plus-ordinary group recovered 28%, which is almost exactly the hobby's own "nothing since 2021 is really rare" thesis, measured.

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Observationally, characterizing what the last burst did, not predicting the next one: when a Pokémon bubble corrects, the cards that historically clawed back shared one trait, demand that existed before the hype. The cards that didn't were the ones the hype created. Not rarity, not grade, not price.

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Happy to get into the method or any specific card in the comments. And if you want to find the best Pokémon cards to invest in, the site weighs release era alongside grade, rarity and real sold prices on any card, free: tcginvest.io

"Just buy from Europe" is one of those things the hobby treats as obviously true and never actually checks. So I checked it, against every card where I have a trustworthy sold price on both sides.

The catch most of these comparisons get wrong, and the first thing people rightly attack: they screenshot a Cardmarket asking price next to a US sold price. That is meaningless. An asking price is what someone hopes to get, a sold price is what a card actually traded for. When I first ran it that way it looked like a coin flip, because a few overpriced European listings drag the asking numbers around.

So I threw the asking prices out and compared realized to realized. Cardmarket's 30-day sold average against PriceCharting's 180-day US sold median, converted at the day's exchange rate, only cards with real sales volume behind them, about 2,800 of them.

One thing I want to be clear about up front, because it kills the obvious objection: this is an English card against the same English card. The "Japanese is cheaper" thing is a totally different print and language. Here it is the exact same English card priced in two marketplaces, so there is no language or print difference doing the work. One object, priced twice.

Europe is cheaper on 77% of cards. The median card sells for 28% less. A third are at least 40% cheaper, the same card same condition for 60 cents on the dollar. The gap is widest in the EX, DP and HGSS era (a 38% median) and tightest on modern cards (15%), which makes sense, modern was printed and distributed globally from day one so the two markets never drifted as far apart.

A few real ones, all heavily traded cards (60+ recorded US sales each over 180 days), Cardmarket 30-day average vs US sold median:

- Gengar ex (Temporal Forces): around 25.72 EUR vs 55.78 USD, 47% less

- Rayquaza VMAX (Evolving Skies): around 39.36 EUR vs 79.00 USD, 42% less

- Pikachu (Cosmic Eclipse): around 77.14 EUR vs 148.34 USD, 40% less

- Lugia-GX (Lost Thunder): around 16.24 EUR vs 30.24 USD, 38% less

The one honest catch: if you are in Europe this is just the price, the discount is yours. If you are in the US, shipping and the odd customs charge eat into a single-card import, sometimes enough to erase the edge on a cheap card, rarely on a 75 dollar plus one. So it is not "import everything," it is "the home price is not automatically the fair price, and on a real card it is worth checking the other side before you buy."

What should I run the numbers on next? Tell me in the comments, I am always hunting for the next thing worth measuring. And if you want to find the Pokémon cards actually worth investing in right now, that is exactly what I built tcginvest.io for !