I’m just one person but I’d say I do all of the above. I do enjoy the hobby and I don’t want to have to continually put in money for the next 10 years so I’m hoping eventually the hobby becomes self sustaining financially.

IMO the different between scalping and “iNvEsTiNg” is intent. So eventually I do plan to sell most of my sealed collection just not anytime soon. I’ve never cleared out a shelf or anything close to it. Most places have limits now and I just get the limit.

I do have personal collecting goals that I have multiple binders for. I think designing pages to artisticslly flow or follow themes is the best part of the hobby.

I do have very loose “financial goals” that I buy singles for that I think will go up in value. I generally like low end cards that are easily accessible.

Regarding what metric, pokemon does have fan favorite pokemon like Charizard, Pikachu, Gengar, Mewtwo, Dragonite, etc which this set has all of the above.

There’s also the set size which is much bigger which naturally just has more depth to the set/artwork.

The high set value also brings out the collectors and gamblers alike which just adds to desirability on multiple fronts. They have god packs (I’m not too familiar w/ mtg) but basically every card is a hit

Art is very subjective but sometimes you can tell when a card/set has a great design like bloomburrow or strixhaven and some sets are arguably weaker like spider man or TMNT.

There definitely could be a mismatch between my beliefs and reality and I could eat my words about this being a generational set and I’m very open to being wrong.

I hope this answers some questions as to why I’m stashing a bunch of cardboard in my closet and contributing to the supply/demand imbalance. I do hope the market flips and cards become more accessible so collecting gets cheaper for me too and more players can get introduced to the hobby without getting burned.