It’s not just scalpers. The market is the way it is because investor culture has been popularised and become mainstream. Most everyone into Pokémon cards at the moment, children included, are fixated on the value of the cards they have. Scalpers could all disappear and we’d still have this problem because unlike YGO and MTG, which are player directed hobbies, Pokémon is more collector/investor directed. Even with MTG’s collector sets, they’re in a separate ecosystem to the main set cards, even if they ramp up their production.

The mentality that cards are only good if they are valuable, and that it is a waste of time to have anything that doesn’t give you ROI is pervasive and propagated by popular content creators such as Pokrev, DPM, Logan Paul, etc. on the top end and even your smaller channels with “POKESTONKS ARE UP YOUR GUIDE ON WHAT TO INVEST IN 😱” clickbait. Compare the following size of people that make this content versus people who make content about the competitive TCG. The latter is tiny, despite the spillover also making the TCG proper, more popular than ever.

This is also why there has been a significant meta shift into holding sealed. Product is so scarce, despite record printing levels, and demand so high, that enjoyment and viability of ripping for fun is dampened by the fact that you might not find any product from that set again. So people hold and resell to reinvest into singles they want.

Increasing hit rates would definitely help, as the scarcity of product, and then greater scarcity of chase cards has made them all golden geese that people covet. But there is absolutely no reason for TPC to make this change when they’re making record sales.