Most Pokémon card talk is about what a card is worth. My first question is whether it's going in my deck. If I can reasonably get the fanciest version, whether it's a promo, a Play! Pokémon stamp, a full art or a Special Illustration Rare (SIR), I'll sleeve it up and shuffle it into my 60. My Basic Box deck runs four full-art Energy Switches and three promo Teal Mask Ogerpons.
I don’t usually hunt for sealed product. I buy it when it’s available, often because I’m playing in a sanctioned Play! Pokémon event. Most of the shops I play at require a purchase to participate, and a $6 pack of Perfect Order usually does the trick. Sometimes I’ll pick up an Elite Trainer Box or something else, but playing every week is a big reason I’ve opened as many packs as I have.
The cards I collect just to collect, though, I keep narrow: this era’s Mega Evolution ex full arts and the Mega Attack Rares. Those are the loud pop-art cards with the attack names blown up across the artwork, in Japanese on English cards and English on Japanese ones. Plenty of collectors can’t stand them. I think they’re sick, and if I build a deck around any of these Pokémon, they’re going straight in it.
My interest in Mega Attack Rares started on Ascended Heroes release day in January, when I pulled a Mega Dragonite, and a buddy told me to name a price. I never named one. I remember Collectr putting it around $75. Today, TCGplayer puts it at $24.97. It’s been sitting in my binder ever since, a monument to my stubbornness and an ironic reminder to sell while it’s hot, then buy it back at a fraction of the price if I still want it. I sold a Mega Hawlucha to a friend for $12 in January and bought one back this fall for $6 when I decided to collect every Mega Attack Rare this era puts out.
That lesson took a while. The Cinccino ex SIR I pulled at the Chaos Rising prerelease is adorable, and for collectors who love cute cards, I’d call it a must-have. But I don’t chase every card of a favorite Pokémon or collect broad categories like cute cards, and Cinccino ex decks rely on coin flips, which aren’t my thing. It wasn’t going into my 60.
Collectr valued it at $200 that night, though the highest recorded sale on TCGplayer was $129. I didn’t know how to sell it, so I held on. Now it’s down to $44.
So when I pulled the Pikachu ex Special Illustration Rare from 30th Celebration on launch day, I’d figured out TCGplayer. It sold that day for $121. Three weeks later, the market price was $59.75.
Good timing.
The great Mew meltdown
The 30th Celebration set hit shelves Sept. 16, and like every major release of the last few years, it brought people camping outside Targets and Best Buys the night before. There were fights and arrests, and nearly a month later, collectors still can’t find product. Some of that frenzy comes down to the mascots, which drive demand for every big Pokémon set. Mew is among the most popular, and this time it got one of the set’s most hyped cards: a Futuristic Rare Mew ex, part of a flashy new rarity built specifically for this release. Its presale market price reportedly peaked around $3,333 in early September, then slid to about $1,258 by release week as word of the pull rates spread.
Then everyone opened their packs.
A 3,000-pack TCGplayer count reported by PokéBeach turned up a Special Illustration Rare about once every 21 packs, against roughly once every 80 for July’s Pitch Black. The two Futuristic Rares appeared at a combined rate of about once every 120 packs. In a separate, smaller sample, TCGtalk estimated a specific Futuristic Rare at once every 163 packs, compared with once every 750 for Mega Darkrai ex SIR, the top chase card from Pitch Black. The Mew everyone had been pricing like an impossible pull wasn’t nearly as hard to find as expected.
By Sept. 21, the Futuristic Mew was down to about $149. Three days later, Kotaku reported that the most expensive card in the numbered main set, a Mew ex SIR, was going for about $152, and most of the set's top cards had already settled under $100. The only other regular cards above $150 besides the Mew were two reprints: Crystal Lugia at $280 and Base Set Charizard at $185. By Oct. 10, the Futuristic Mew was down to around $62. That’s about 95% off its release-week price, and less than 2% of what it was going for in presale.
The Discords turned into group therapy. In one anonymous post quoted by Polygon, a user said he’d paid homeless people in his area to wait in line, promising them half the profits or $200 cash for every Elite Trainer Box they brought back. “I am losing about $150 per ETB at current prices,” he wrote. Another reseller’s viral post, which Polygon couldn’t verify, floated legal action over his own ETBs. Against whom? Pikachu?
Not every Mew in the set was easy to find, though. Pokémon also slipped red, green and blue versions into packs without putting them on the printed checklist. Illustrated by YOSHIROTTEN, they’re a nod to the original Pokémon Red, Green and Blue games. Even TCGplayer’s 3,000-pack opening couldn’t pin down their pull rates. Another collector recorded just one RGB Mew across 4,063 streamed pack openings, nowhere near enough to establish the true odds.
And their prices are something else. As of Oct. 9, TCGplayer had the red Mew at $6,000.27, off one recorded sale. Green sat at $3,738.75 after four sales. The blue showed $1,702.50, which looks like a bargain until you check the sales history. There are two recorded transactions: one for $3,400 and, somehow, another for $5. TCGplayer’s market price simply averaged the two. Somebody must have made a spectacular mistake, and the cheapest listed blue was $3,600.
Those are awfully thin markets to put much faith in, but they’re a world apart from the Futuristic Mew’s collapse.
For players, falling prices have their upside. Cards that were expensive on release day become a lot easier to put into a deck. I’ve already sleeved up the ones I wanted to play.
And a buddy from my weekly game says he’ll give me the last Mega Attack Rare I’m missing from the current releases: Mega Froslass. I already have the Japanese version, so the English one finishes the set—until the next three come out.
The Dragonite isn’t going anywhere and the Mega Froslass is on its way.