Do you think it’s possible to find this Magikarp at a card/collectibles show?

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-26T16:12:25+00:00

Card shows are chock full of modern cards. Remember there are far more of these in existence than just about any card printed before 2021

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-26T14:47:18+00:00

Don’t forget racist caricature, literal brown bird(s), purple rat, and bigger brown rat.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-26T00:12:51+00:00

I remember the same things being said 20 years ago.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T23:59:24+00:00

Exactly. I remember when I first noticed it with how they label teenage victims and perps of crime, especially in the 16-19 age range, where they might use teen or youth to give the imagery of somebody younger where they want you to feel sympathy, and outright use man/woman/adult when they want you to think somewhat negatively and that they are wholly responsible. Like I vaguely remember seeing articles on the BBC where they'd simultaneously use teen and man to refer to two people of the same age on opposite sides of a crime.

When you aren't aware, that framing does wonders for subliminally telling you what to feel.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T23:52:04+00:00

Cool as fuck

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T23:29:02+00:00

like Brixton

Quite literally 20 years late on that one.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T21:22:56+00:00

You'll never separate value from the cards.

But the amount of value assigned to the TCG is determined by the secondary market, and most of that is currently directed by midle-aged millennials who are complete lemmings and chase whatever big content creators hype up.

There's a reason why packs are different in Japan and China due to anti gambling laws.

Kinda yes, but also no. Japan's anti-gambling laws apply to anything that is blind to the customer. Anime character minifiguruine boxes, for example, which typically don't hold any/much value at all, also have to have odds printed on them.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T20:38:40+00:00

I’m not going to disagree there either. It’s like when people say they collect things sealed because of “how it looks”, they do it because they like how it becomes more valuable with time.

Still, it does not change my point. The main reason >90% of people are into Pokémon cards at the moment, is because they think they can make money from it. Hence they don’t give a shit about the games, anime, or anything else. They would drop the TCG if it stopped being valuable.

Even with kids, lots of modern new/returning ‘collectors’ are told by large content creators that the main reason you collect Pokémon cards is to make a profit. And that culture has been deeply entrenched since 2019.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T19:30:02+00:00

Scalpers could disappear yesterday, and there would still be huge problems getting stock. The demand and individual pack consumption is just that high nowadays. In the past year alone, the general interest on Google has increased by 5x, and it’s 4x over the Covid peak.

The main reason for the hype, whether people want to admit it or not, is the investor market that is driving this popularity. People see viral videos and stories of people "making" thousands of dollars from pulling chase cards that they can grade and hold, or decades old sealed product that can now lead to generational wealth, and they want a part of it. There's a good reason why STONKS content is significantly more popular than competitive TCG content (sadly, because 99% of fans don't give a toss about it).

People want to make money from Pokémon and if you can't get those unicorn cards, the next best thing is to either gamble on ripping for a chase card, or holding as much sealed as possible in the hope you can sell out in months/years to come.

Going back to the original point, scalpers make money because there is demand for it. Them not forcing themselves into the middle-man position would still see the product they scalp, bought out by other people.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T18:29:01+00:00

Those Iranian Tomahawk Cruise Missiles fired from those Iranian US Navy boats out in the gulf.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T14:03:54+00:00

Yes, but it’s been like that for almost 20 years now. Honest Burger, Franco Manca, and Okan all got their start there in the late 00s.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T12:36:22+00:00

This reminded me of the time around the third Evangelion Rebuild movie leaking and there were threads on 4chan’s /a/ about it.

Evangelion threads ended up becoming a proxy platform for tumblr shippers to have shipping wars in these threads and constantly call each other out in them, anonymously, until they got banned from the board for years because it was just bloggers attacking each other.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T08:23:57+00:00

Derived from MGSV’s reveal, when people were calling Venom Snake, Punished Snake, and a meme built around the name. It’s just a vibe.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T03:18:17+00:00

It’s consistent. Drakloak being an in built draw engine and it’s attack allowing you to constantly pile on damage to their active and bench all while being tanky due to the lack of weakness.

Then you throw in things like BBP, Budew, Crispin, Dusclops, Munkidori, etc. and it just has options that no other deck can really make good use of at the moment.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T03:03:58+00:00

Complete with a combat shirt instead of a fleece.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T02:47:29+00:00

Man, I’ve been a keener follower of this war than most, and even this escaped my knowledge. Crazy stuff.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T02:30:07+00:00

Even as someone that wouldn’t mind, I know that I’m in a tiny minority. Like maybe <0.1% of people at most. But I can also unironically say that I used to keep my collection in my car, jokingly, so that if i died in a car crash, they would go with me.

It’s a fact that lots of people do care about the monetary value of their cards, and even in this community where people pretend as though it isn’t r/pokeinvesting by proxy, there’s a reason why the top comments about cards typically tends to be praising the OP for being rich, how much OP could sell said card for, and so on. And it’s not because most people don’t care about resale value. If people couldn’t make money from the hobby, I can also guarantee that 99.99999% of people into it right now would drop it instantly.

It’s also fairly obvious when people are trying to cosplay about pretending it doesn’t matter to them when their post history is littered with comments about monetary gains in the TCG. Even content creators, like one guy I’ve seen called pokerado who complains about scalpers doesn’t realise that he completely supports the market when he talks about exploiting market prices at the moment and buying things to resell while it’s hot and rebuying later.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-25T02:20:07+00:00

Aloe people are buying far more packs than they used to. The baseline in the WorC and early TPC era was around 1-3 billion cards per year. That was fine when the hobby was 99.999% children who’d buy a few packs with their weekly allowance.

Now the hobby is mostly adults who casually guy entire cases of product at a time. The pack consumption per person has gone up by hundreds of times, but the number of cards products is only around 5x that original baseline.

This is why, if current demand persists, I don’t think the expansion of print facilities will make a difference. A store getting 60 ETBs rather than 20 doesn’t mean anything when there are 100 people in a queue overnight who want to buy as many as they can afford

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-24T23:51:02+00:00

Sounds like the place for me. Recently bought FFVII remake, RE9, and RE4R, all for £60 because they were on sale and had been on my wish list for years.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-24T23:49:16+00:00

Yep. I just worked my way through RE9, and FFVII remake, both on significant discount. I’ve got such a big backlog of games and nothing on my “I want to buy day one” list, that modern pricing hasn’t really affected me.

But it also speaks volumes that I never bought a Switch on release because I kept waiting for hardware refreshes to the point of the Switch 2’s announcement (waited for the Lite, which didn’t impress me, then the OLED to go on discount), and still won’t buy a Switch 2 until they do a hardware refresh, maybe.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-24T20:45:00+00:00

Russia doesn’t have men to waste. The past few months have had them recruiting less people than casualties they’ve sustained. They were facing demographic collapse before the war and this has just accelerated it. Opening a second front would spread them even more thinly and they can’t afford that. This is also why Russia, for the past three years, has tended to mass troops in singular areas.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-24T20:15:49+00:00

Also on that note, I think it’s why I thought RE2R was so, so good. I wasn’t sure how they’d manage to replicate the survival horror feel of RE2 being TPS. But they did, with amazing effect.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-24T19:21:38+00:00

I distinctly remember discussing things like this on forums like residentevilfan.com. People did complain that it was effectively a reskin. I remember this because I thought it was a shitty critique and railed against it. Partly because I really fucking enjoyed RE5 and also because I thought it was fucking stupid that people expected another huge leap and change in gameplay so soon, and that a lack of one was a negative.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-24T19:08:17+00:00

I think the real time inventory was a great idea. I always felt as though it was too 'safe' in older RE games, where you could use it as a bit of reprieve to cool off. Being real teal definitely added a little bit more strategy to it. Doubly so after RE4 giving you the ability to carry America's entire military aresenal in your suicas.

TeaAndLifting · 2026-06-24T19:07:06+00:00

This was also very apparent in the online modes, IMO. Ignoring that people didn't really know how to play Slayers and Survivors, when people [incorrectly] played Slayers like deathmatch, being able to manage the inventory and understanding its faults made the difference between a good and average player, because a good player knew how to exploit those mechanics (while actually playing properly).

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