Author: Josh

Attention all Pokémon fans! Get ready for the highly anticipated release of the Pokémon Crown Zenith trading card set, coming in January.

Join the list for a chance to win one of 3 Pokemon Crown Zenith Elite Trainer boxes we are giving away!

We will also be giving special pricing to members who join the list. So, join the list for your chance to win and to receive Crown Zenith at a discount price. Winners will be selected at 10am PST on January 16, 2023.

As a collector, player, and seller of Pokémon cards, I am excited to see this set in hand. With 70 special artwork cards in the Galarian Gallery collection, this is going to be hits-galore and a pure joy to open packs.

The Legendary heroes Zacian and Zamazenta shine with new VSTAR Powers, and an all-star assembly of Pokémon and Trainers arrive to celebrate the era of Pokémon V! Discover dazzling special illustrations in the Galarian Gallery, and wield the strength of rare and powerful Pokémon, including Charizard as both a Pokémon VSTAR and Radiant Pokémon. Many more Pokémon have their own tales to tell in battle as the Sword & Shield Series reaches its towering peak in the Pokémon TCG: Crown Zenith expansion!

The Pokémon Company

One of the highlights of the Pokémon Crown Zenith set is the inclusion of the all-new Mythical Pokémon, Zeraora. This electric-type Pokémon is sure to be a hit with collectors, with its unique design and powerful abilities.

The Pokémon Crown Zenith set will introduce a variety of new and returning Pokémon cards, including fan favorites like Pikachu, Charmander, and Squirtle, as well as new and unique Pokémon like the dragon-type Reshiram and the psychic-type Zekrom.

The English set will include the following:

Over 160 cards
3 brand-new Radiant Pokémon
5 colossal Pokémon VMAX
8 shining Pokémon VSTAR
17 powerful Pokémon V
70 cards with special artwork in the Galarian Gallery

Are you excited for the release of the Pokémon Crown Zenith trading card set? Let us know and be sure to pre-order your set today to get in on all the action when it releases in January!

If you’re like me, you are addicted to watching Poké Tubers of all kinds. Box breakers, players, collectors, and store owners alike. If you’ve been watching recently you’ll notice a little shift in tone from the store owners. Maybe they are scowling a bit more, a touch of crankiness. You may have also noticed how much more product has hit the market all at once! Retailers have significantly more product to sell, prices have fallen to levels where the average Jane and Joe can finally get their hands on awesome sets like Evolving Skies!

So what gives? Why are retailers a bit on edge?

It seems clear to me, the Pokémon Company wanted to make sure there was plenty of product available for the holidays – Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the intense shopping that happens between now and Christmas day. The odd thing is, we’ve been scratching for more product for over a year… How did they suddenly resolve the capacity to produce more product??? My guess is, to be able to release the amount of product as quickly as they have over the past couple of weeks they must have been stockpiling cards as they were printed, readying to unleash the November torrent we are now seeing.

This might initially seem awesome for everyone. Retailers want lots of product to sell. Buyers want access to lots of product at fair prices. Sounds kind of like the old days when our distributors always had some set booster boxes in stock, ready to ship… EXCEPT, for the past year retailers have been ordering with the idea products would be received in waves. For example, if I place an order for 96 boxes of Chilling Regin with my distributor I would be told I was going to get that amount divided into 3 to 4 waves – a nice chunk at release, a bit more a few months later, and maybe the rest some time after that. Stores planned their ordering and cash flow around that concept.

A little preface and then we explore the trouble some stores now find themselves in…

We have always been huge advocates of using cash on hand, not credit, to purchase new inventory. Of course this is limiting, you don’t have the leverage advantage that using credit has, and you are literally limiting you business by the amount of cash you have available to spend. The huge advantage cash on hand has is limiting risk. You don’t have to worry about selling though inventory just in time to pay back credit cards before interest kicks in – margins on trading cards are so thin paying interest can quickly wipe out profits. Add the lack of inventory control and putting products on credit cards and you’re setting yourself up for disaster! This right here is one of the things shaking the retailer side of the business right now. So many retailers are stuck taking on product they don’t have cash on hand for, putting it on credit cards, and they still don’t know what other inventory they might have to take on come the new week.

Why don’t stores simply turn down new inventory? Because demand is so high, everybody and their mother opened a retail account – so many, that some distributors are no longer accepting new applications – distributors have so many accounts they can allocate product to, turning down product you had previously said you would buy can quickly put you on the outs with your distributor, and potentially put you out of business.

We count our lucky stars we are risk averse and don’t order beyond our ability to purchase with cash, but even we are not immune from the unexpected! When we put our orders in for a product we usually get the original invoice price when the product is ready for us to take possession of. One of our distributors thankfully holds to this and always honors the original price. One of our other distributors doesn’t.

For example, when we put in our order for Vivid Voltage many moons ago our quoted price was our standard booster box rate (DM me on Twitter if you want to want to know the numbers, etc.), we just got our final wave and were invoiced $115 per booster box. Obviously that means we can no longer sell them for the $109.99 price we were selling them for 🙁

Here’s the breakdown of selling a Vivid Voltage booster box for our current $129.99 price
+$129.99 our price to customers
-$115 current cost of product from our distributor
-$3.98 in credit card processing fees (2.9% + $0.35)
-$10 USPS priority mail shipping
-$0.98 sturdy shipping box
$0.03 Adj. NET 🙁

We obviously don’t want to see our favorite TCG shops go out of business, but the current situation could shake the market up a bit. Keep in mind, all those $95 Chilling Reign booster boxes and $85 Battle Styles booster boxes you see online are being sold at a loss by retailers. They need to get rid of them to free up capital because the next round of product might be around the corner and those credit cards are gonna come due!

Does this help or hurt the hobby in the long run?

The obvious answer is, “who knows?” The immediate reality is, there is currently an imbalance in supply and demand. In a perfect world the customer gets what they want at a great price and the retailer makes a little money so they can keep providing Pokémon to the customer. We spent the last year out of balance with severe supply shortages, mostly hurting the end consumer. Now we’ve swung the other direction. Can we find our way to the middle again?

We just added a small quantity of Evolving Skies booster boxes for presale. We normally don’t offer products ahead of release day but we want to get these into your hands as quickly as possible! Orders will ship on release day, August 27th.

Vivid Voltage is one of those sets that always flies off the virtual shelves. It’s hard to keep it stocked so we’re excited when we wake up Monday mornings and see we’re getting more in!

Small restock and new addition today. Here’s what we’ve added…

• Restocked Vivid Voltage Booster Box
• Restocked Chilling Reign Build & Battle Box
• Added 2021 Trainer’s Toolkit

The 2021 Trainer’s Toolkit might be a sleeper pick. It comes with 2 copies of the beautiful and very playable Crobat V!

The woes and struggles of allocations are still hitting us again.

When Battle Styles released and we got everything we asked for, it looked like we had turned a corner. Thinking we’d get a lot more product in, we were getting hopeful we’d be able to start offering pre-orders on sets like Chilling Reign and Evolving Skies. The more product we can get, the better and more competitive pricing we can offer our customers. We want to get back to selling booster boxes in the $100 to $110 range! We know that kind of pricing is what brings customers to our store and build loyalty. Unfortunately it seems allocations have recently become worse than what we were receiving at the end of 2020. Fingers crossed it turns around!

I am seeing way too many “the sky is falling” type videos and social media posts about Pokemon TCG prices tanking lately. There is panic in the market right now, but should you be panicking too? That’s a good question and the answer depends on why you’re buying Pokemon TCG in the first place.

A seller’s perspective

Since we transitioned to being an online shop only a few years back, we know first hand the different dynamics between pricing for a physical store and a virtual one. The biggest being the cost of overhead! When we had the physical store we had monthly rent, water & power bills, employees…all of those things eat into margins. It is incredibly difficult to make money running an LGS — the margins on selling TCGs are so extremely thing. A physical store NEEDS to clear at minimum 30% margin, whereas an online only shop can get away with 20% margins or even less. Sure, you’re not going to be making much at 20% but you can still cover any overhead you might have…hosting costs, seller fees if you’re selling on eBay, Amazon, etc.

We are seeing a lot sellers who are over leveraged, getting squeezed and needing to dump their inventory to free up capital. Generalizing, I see two types of sellers in the market that drive prices in the short term and in the long term. 1) Sellers who put all their capital and credit into each release and require selling their entire inventory in order keep buying new products 2) Sellers who have access to larger pools of cash/capital and can keep buying new product regardless of sales.

If you look at the prices of Battle Styles you can see the squeeze happening on the first type of sellers. For the first time in a long time sellers had access to larger amounts of product. Heck, we easily got our full allocations on Battle Styles; it’s been a really long time since we’ve seen that happen! We still see an abundance of Battle Styles product available in the marketplace. Imagine if we had put all our cash into buying Battle Styles AND we got full allocations? We would still be sitting on so much inventory we wouldn’t be able to purchase our allocation of Chilling Reign, put in pre-orders for Evolving Skies, etc. It can snowball out of control very quickly for sellers who do that, resulting in illiquidity, possibly losing their relationships with their distributors, and closing up shop.

Even for most online sellers, selling a booster box at or below $100, including shipping, equals breakeven or a loss. We are seeing tons of products being unloaded at below this price right now which a strong clue as to how their business is managed.

If you are thinking of becoming a seller, I highly recommend taking a slow approach and having a enough capital to buy through all releases for at least one year. Assuming 5 to 6 releases per year you can easily do the math. Ebing a smart seller means you are buying time to make more rational business decision rather than getting backed into a corner and having to sell at a loss. Set yourself up to be able to be patient. Heck, in person play hasn’t even started up again, that could be a game changer and energize the market…who knows.

A collector/player’s perspective

I hope you’re buying Pokemon because you love playing the game or collecting it, but there are also soooooo many people who jumped in this past year who only see it as a commodity. Look how many YouTube channels there are dedicated to Pokemon TCG prices! Some are great and informative — others just jumped on the bandwagon — no doubt the market downturn will shake out the bandwagon peeps.

It’s a good lesson to collect what you love because there is a fair chance you will lose money. Being stuck with something you come to loathe is no fun at all. I have a large, vintage PEZ collection that I have amassed over 20 years of collecting. The 2000s saw a huge boom in PEZ prices and then the 2008 financial crash that brought everything down decimated PEZ collectible prices, and they’ve never really recovered. I bought all the way through the rise and fall in prices, but I love my collection. I have so many specific memories tied to even ones that are probably forever worth 50% less than I paid. If I had collected with the notion my collection would make me right, I would be devastated today.

I won’t disparage people who buy Pokemon TCG as only an investment, but smart investors are diversified into a wide range of investments — they’re not putting all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. Similar to sellers who are over leveraged, you don’t want to put yourself in a position where you HAVE to sell you collection because prices are falling.

Only time will tell if the current downturn in prices gets deeper, but one thing is for sure, if you’re a player or collector this is a great time to be a buyer! The Pokemon Company has really been putting out fantastic products lately — the new card artwork has been ridiculously good! This gives me very strong faith in the longterm viability of the game, the collectibility, the playability, and Pokemon as an investment.