The Pokémon TCG hobby has been in a difficult place for the past few years, and it's causing a lot of upset for the fans of this game. Getting hold of new sealed product in the wilds is like catching a slippery fish with your bare hands. You have to be alert, prepared, and lucky, and even then you'll probably lose out to a scalper with an army of bots (I guess in this analogy, they're a hungry brown bear).
Collectors are obsessed with the value of Pokémon cards, above literally anything else about the game. Trust me, as someone who writes about this hobby almost daily. It's no accident that most of our Pokémon TCG stories are about - not gameplay - but rare Pokémon cards selling for big bucks, cards rising or falling in price, or the few decent deals on sealed products that do crop up here and there. We go where the traffic is and write the Pokémon stories the internet has shown us it wants to read.
It's widely agreed that it's a major problem how valuable the top Pokémon cards have become, because packs are now so desirable that it's totally warped the environment around the game. Scalpers line their walls with hoarded boxes, retail store staff make hidden stashes so they can take product to the tills themselves, and parents can't find Pokémon cards to buy for their kids.
But if you are one of those people who loves the Pokémon TCG for the game underneath all the lottery ticket hunting, I would argue the Pokémon market isn't as bad as people make out. It's superior, in fact, to those of most other big TCGs like Magic: The Gathering. The trick is simply to buy singles, not packs.
That's because in Pokémon, the items that sell for absurd figures are always the ultra-rare variants of cards that have much cheaper versions on offer. Take the biggest card from Mega Evolution, Lucario ex. The Mega Hyper Rare variant so blingy it makes my eyes hurt is worth close to $500. The regular edition? About 90 cents.
I guess that Pokémon card isn't played in tournament-winning decks, so perhaps it's a bad example. But the principle holds even when you look at cards that have rocked the competitive scene for years. Paldean Fate's Gardevoir ex sells for less than a dollar. Dragapult ex can be yours for just $0.60, just so long as you don't demand an SIR.
There are some exceptions. If a Pokémon card is a staple of multiple decks for a long time with few reprints, it can eventually become a little pricey. That's what happened to Fezandipiti ex. This card, thanks to its powerful card draw engine, was worth $16, until it was just recently reprinted in the Trainer's Toolkit, in October 2025.
But even the fact that Pokémon puts out products like this, designed to get the most competitive cards into fans' hands, is lightyears better than what TCGs typically manage.
According to a recent analysis by DeckFlare, the Pokémon TCG is the cheapest trading card game to play at a competitive level, with top decks like Dragapult/Dusknoir and Gardevoir ex all selling for just $40 - $50.
In Magic: The Gathering, the best decks in the cheapest competitive format, Standard, range from $200 - $500, and things only get worse from there. Modern decks are $400 - $900 and if you want to be a Legacy player, you'd better be prepared to part with about $3,000 per deck. Yikes.
If you're buying TCG singles instead of packs, it's great to be able to try out decks before you invest in them, so you can figure out which cards to actually order in the first place. And wouldn't you know it, the Pokémon TCG has the best option here too.
Whatever other issues the app might have, no one can knock Pokémon TCG Live for its business model, which is surprisingly generous. It's trivial to unlock every card in the app, which means you can experiment to your heart's content and test out any deck before dropping a modest amount of cash on it.
Overall then, if you completely disconnect from the pseudo-gambling, investor bro side of Pokémon and engage with it as a game first and foremost, the Pokémon TCG has a fantastic secondary market.
Maybe I'm being a bit short-sighted, though, championing the singles-purchasing player over the box-buying collector. Maybe the Pokémon TCG's business model, which keeps the game so accessible, only works because Pokémon has far more collectors than it has players.
There are so many resellers, binder-builders, and pack rippers that only care about rare or pretty cards and never once head to a prerelease or play a game with the cards they own. If people were more interested in the gameplay rather than just the rarities, the market would shift accordingly and we would probably see the best Pokémon cards reflecting their strength in their price tag.
So, I guess what I'm saying is thank you very much, Pokémon scalpers, for keeping this game so cheap to play!
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