This brings us back to me, years later, an adult, laying in bed thinking about Pokemon cards. I packed it all in and I headed for the greener pastures of the "Living Card Games" by Fantasy Flight Games, which did away with randomised boosters and offered a more constructed experience with games like Android: Netrunner and A Game of Thrones: The Card Game. The card was selling for £40 a pop on eBay, so that was it. After feverishly unwrapping them in what was, to be fair, a pretty cathartic pack-cracking binge, I couldn't believe what had happened: after all that money spent, I hadn't pulled a single Darkrai-EX, and I needed four.
I decided to take the plunge and drop £80 on a box of 36 Dark Explorers booster packs. The deck winning all the local tournaments had four of these cards, and it was available as part of the Dark Explorers expansion, so obviously I needed it. In 2012 a card called Darkrai-EX came along, at the height of my love and obsession for Pokemon cards. Pokemon, on the other hand, is effectively pay or lose. Hearthstone, the popular online collectible card game from Blizzard, lets you break down unwanted cards so you can craft those you need. Magic the Gathering, for example, widely supports multiple formats for veterans and newcomers on any budget, with limited formats like Draft and Sealed levelling the playing field, and a much larger player base to support this. To a certain extent it's just the nature of the beast, but other card games offer alternatives to you hemorrhaging cash just to keep up with the meta. What I'm describing will of course sound familiar to anyone who has played any trading or collectible card game.
But of course the rare, powerful cards are in high demand and have a premium price tag attached to them. So unless you're funded by Team Rocket or you can convince someone to trade their very good cards for your not-so-good ones, the next logical step is to find someone selling the cards you need on eBay or through a collectible card seller online. It seems simple, but herein lies the inherent problem with The Pokemon Trading Card Game: the best decks have the best cards, and the best cards are often rare (or even ultra rare), which makes pulling them randomly from booster packs extremely unlikely and uneconomical. Certain decks of 60 cards are just better than others, so if you want to be competitive you need to have one of those decks. Something you learn about very quickly in the world of Pokemon cards is the meta.
Building decks and taking my best Pokemon cards into an intense one-on-one battle was far more exciting than anything I had experienced in the video games. I quickly started playing and competing, thanks to the support of my local Pokemon League and the friendly bunch of players who turned up each Saturday morning. It was oddly fulfilling about being able to spend adult money on something I could rarely afford as a scruffy 11-year-old in secondary school.
Pokemon sun and moon card prices Offline#
It's one of the best online and offline card games on the market, with the added bonus of fuzzy nostalgia in pocket-sized monster form.Ī few years ago I got back into Pokemon cards. But for many, including myself, it's so much more than that. Opening booster packs of 10 randomised cards, comparing shinies with mates, and making ill-advised trading decisions based on the playground economics of each card's perceived worth. No, I was thinking about how bloody expensive the Pokemon Trading Card Game is, and this made me unreasonably upset at roughly 1 in the morning.įor a lot of people, the Pokemon Trading Card Game is something they remember fondly from school. I wasn't counting Mareep to lull myself into a slumber, nor was I dreaming of sliding down the freakishly long neck of an Alolan Exeggutor (not tonight, at least). I lay restlessly in bed a few nights ago thinking about something I presume many people who have just turned 30 think about: Pokemon cards.