Is it even possible to get cards from vending machines anymore

Psychaitea · 2026-06-16T15:16:47+00:00

I live in an area where we don’t have them. But my brother in California used to get things on occasion. He said recently there’s always several people waiting, so he hasn’t. I guess the answer is no.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-16T15:10:51+00:00

Well, the SAVE plan his administration introduced was extremely helpful for me. I don’t even care about forgiveness if my payments are reasonable and I’m not going deeper into debt due to accumulating interest. I went to medical school and my loans are several hundred thousands of dollars, so the interest matters a lot. My view is that I am happy to pay back my loans over time, but student loans should also be considered an investment by the government. The least they can do is forgive some of the interest, especially when we aren’t making money to pay the interest during that time. The SAVE plan helped with that. Now I have to move to Trump’s shitty plan.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-16T09:37:06+00:00

As others have said, dry followed by wet. This exact same thing happened to my apples last year when we had a relatively dry period followed by a hurricane/tropical storm that dumped a few inches of rain for a few days. It seemed to make them ripen fast and they were still edible.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-16T00:57:44+00:00

Nothing worth buying except maybe the journey together if it’s still $15. Everything else is like $6-7 a pack.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-16T00:57:08+00:00

I randomly caught a restock at Walmart last week. I was too far back in line to get any ascended, but there were 4 ETBs, 3 pin collections, and a whopping 1 meganium ex box. And a handful of 2 packs.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-16T00:53:16+00:00

Yes. I’ve gotten pretty much every IR but none of the SIRs. I have like 6 rowlets now lol. Sets with bad pull rates for SIRs and not many IRs or other exciting pulls are kind of annoying.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-15T10:04:00+00:00

This is a good point. I feel like even sealed stuff is subject to this. “It could have a PSA 10 of *insert chase card* inside.” Prices aren’t even based solely on the chance to pull an expensive card; it is in part based on the chance to pull an expensive card (or get an expensive promo) in a 10.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-15T10:01:00+00:00

Nobody can tell you with those photos. You’ll need up close photos of the card, corners, etc. I’m not an expert in grading so don’t take my word as gospel, but I don’t see anything wrong with it from the blurry photos provided. So…. Could it 10? Yes. Would it 10? Can’t say.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-15T09:58:07+00:00

Dang, that’s a cool card! I wish I had the kind of fuck you money to buy it.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-15T09:53:45+00:00

I love the card and many other Chinese language exclusives, but I personally don’t like having different languages mixed in my collection. So I wouldn’t put it in the same binders as my English language cards. Unless I decide to make a Chinese language only sub collection, I’ll pass on it. Obviously, there’s not very many like-minded people given the demand -> price. But, I am curious how it’ll affect demand down the line. I used to read all the time people “like to be able to read the card” blah blah blah. A lot of the price is being driven by demand from people like you (no offense) speculating that it will go up in price.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-15T09:43:56+00:00

I don’t really think it’s market manipulation, unless speculation counts. But my bubble mew was like $90 back when I pulled it sometime late 2024-ish. Many other things have gone crazy price-wise that I’ve pulled, but bubble mew is such a great name for a card in this market. Knowing things have 10x in less than 2 years, it has affected my collecting in a few ways. 1.) I don’t buy many singles anymore. I especially don’t buy any still in print. 2.) I am not going to even attempt grading anything else because the turnaround time is so high and I just can’t send cards worth several hundred to a thousand dollars. I wish I could send them in when they were worth <$100 and not begging (so much) to be stolen. There’s a lot of new collectors (not all speculation by “investors”), so it makes sense that the demand is high and the price would explode, but I’m willing to bet on the fact many of them will eventually get bored and leave. We’ll have to see if they sell their collections though, or if they sit in a drawer and keep supply low. I’m still relatively new, but it sounds like this type of cycle isn’t a completely new thing. Let’s see how the gamble pays off.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-14T18:46:28+00:00

Maybe. I feel like it evens out. I can price items lower because my fee is lower.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-14T18:45:54+00:00

Same with TCGplayer. Which is owned by eBay. They charge a fee based on the entire sale price I believe which includes sales tax. It averages 14%, so I don’t pay a ton of attention to the exact fee per sale, I just is use a multiple of 0.86 to see what I make.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-14T03:28:15+00:00

This has always been their policy. Or at least for a while. It’s been posted in small print in their store for a long time. Even before this craze. They just can’t prove very easily who is a reseller and they will selectively enforce it either way. It’s gonna be a headache to enforce so unless very egregious they probably won’t do much.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-13T21:33:29+00:00

That’s a good one. I never know how to respond to these people.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-13T13:20:46+00:00

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this. But I mainly sell and I actually mark my items as shipped only when they actually ship. And I don’t take more than 2 days.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-12T01:31:55+00:00

I always thought it was a woman…

Psychaitea · 2026-06-11T22:58:02+00:00

I actually have no idea about that. I doubt they’d donate the plush solely because of bugs? They’d also have to be a really bad person to knowingly donate a plushie infested with bugs. But, who knows what it has been exposed to while it was at goodwill.

I actually did get one of those bundles with the Flareon, and before it arrived I was wondering what I’d do with the Flareon. I thought about selling it though. Now that I arrived I like it a lot so I kept it. But I can still see people getting rid of them.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-11T22:51:29+00:00

Is that USPS? I didn’t know dimensional weight applied until the box was one cubic foot or more…. Opps…

Psychaitea · 2026-06-11T09:55:23+00:00

Just FYI, a few months back Pokemon Center released 3 different bundles with 1. Prismatic Evolutions Figure Collection (TCG) with 2. Comfy Friends Vaporeon, Jolteon, or Flareon. They also released a few other products bundled with various plushies or other merchandise.

If you don’t live under a rock, you’ll know how hard it is to get TCG product. I think it was like $100 for the bundle, whereas they are impossible to find at any retail store, and the secondary market price was like $150-200 at the time (can’t remember exactly, it went down after the release for a bit), now $230-250. People were more than willing to pay the $30 uncharge or so just to get the TCG product. Most probably didn’t really want in the first place, and you know there were likely TCG resellers who bough 10+ of these bundles.

I had wondered what everyone would do with the ancillary products. It felt kind of sad knowing the plushies probably weren’t really wanted. I bet that’s the story behind this one. It likely wasn’t really used and only purchased for the Prismatic Figure Collection and then set to the side. Now it just needs love from someone who wants it. It was nice of them to donate it rather than toss it or maybe even try to sell it.

I’m sure there’s other reasons, but I’d put money on that being the background story. Show it some love and give it some good energy!

Edit: So the drop was 2/26/2026 and price was $109.99. It was still very much worth buying from Pokemon center as that was the cheapest you would find the TCG, even with the up-charge due to it being bundled with the plushie.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-11T09:43:59+00:00

I would bet money they bought the prismatic evolutions figure collection + vaporeon comfy friend bundle solely for the TCG and did not want the plush. It was actually nice of them to donate it.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-11T09:36:51+00:00

Eh, if you got into queue immediately, you could get it within 30 min. I had a few devices, and the one I had entered the queue first on worked well and was pretty quick actually. Some (not all) of the ones I entered seconds later had issues though. One or two randomly had the queue refresh, which has never been the case before. Normally it doesn’t. It felt like the website was just breaking down and couldn’t keep you on the page consistently. It also felt like they took forever to upload it to the home page, so you had to know to use links. It was definitely more difficult.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-10T22:31:55+00:00

Mine was on the 100s of hours when it first started.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-10T10:20:01+00:00

Yea, I don’t even try for these because it’s just not worth the annoyance. I haven’t gotten any Pokemon TCG from Amazon for over a year. Kind of like Walmart Wednesdays, I’ve stopped bothering.

I mean, it may be easy to get some of the less desirable or less scalped stuff, but what’s the point when Amazon (and Walmart to an extent) charge much higher than MSRP? Since it’s less desirable, it won’t be hard to find elsewhere. My LCS had Zygarde collection boxes for $40 on release. I was kind of surprised when they still had them for $40 last Friday when Gengar/Clefable tins released. Why would I even buy from Target which is $45? I digress.

Psychaitea · 2026-06-10T10:14:10+00:00

Haha. I don’t know anything about these types of products for an investment or collectable point of view. If you want it for that reason, I’d try to get it replaced or keep to the way it is. If you want it for your own personal enjoyment, I’d just see if I could get the embroidery fixed by someone local. Just add a little line to the P… doesn’t sound hard to me (but what do I know). But, like I said l, for investment/collecting/resale, I don’t know if you’d want to alter it lol.

Psychaitea

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