In recent years, the Pokémon TCG has become more of an investable asset for collectors, with vintage Pokémon cards reaching ridiculous prices compared to their original values. It’s no secret—seemingly endless apps and products highlight the predicted value of your binders with each passing day. Green means up, red means down. However, in an interview with UltraBall, Boneparth suggests that the perfect storm could mean those cards lose up to 80% of their value.
Before you celebrate, there are a few notable things that Douglas Boneparth, president of Bone Fide Wealth and co-author of Money Together, says that add a big ol’ question mark over Pokémon TCG as an investment. In the interview, Boneparth compares cards to mainstream assets like owning a home (who can afford that?) and the S&P 500, suggesting that your collection could see “60%, 70%, or 80% drawdowns during times when nobody wants to talk about Pokémon cards.”
Those Pokémon cards are going to have 60%, 70%, or 80% drawdowns during times where nobody wants to talk about Pokémon cards. ~ Douglas Boneparth via Ultraball
That doesn’t mean it will happen, nor do I expect to see Shadowless Charizards or other vintage Pokémon cards going for cheap on eBay. In non-financial-coded terms, it simply means that, if people stopped caring about Pokémon cards, their value could plummet massively. While that may seem obvious, what interests me more is that Boneparth directly compares the current investor-heavy Pokémon TCG market to NFTs, and suggests that scalping could contribute to falling values, while celebrity involvement has caused general values to surge.
When compared to NFT and cryptocurrency investments, Boneparth suggests that the “Venn diagram has a lot of overlap.” He continues, with the main overlap being “ask and bid spreads being wide, and scarcity.” Much like NFTs in the early 2020s, the value of Pokémon cards is based on “someone’s idea that it’s worth a certain amount, that it looks cool, is rare, and has a trading market where someone will pay more or less than what you bought it for.”
On the discussion of scalpers, which has been a tough spot for many Pokémon TCG collectors (I say that while looking in a mirror), Boneparth suggests that “It’s a net negative,” before adding that it’s “market manipulation where asset prices are finagled by outside influence rather than what’s in the pack or how the market is supposed to function.”
Callum Self
The interviewer also asks Boneparth how Pokémon cards compare to the period when celebrities got involved in the NFT trend. The sale of Logan Paul’s $16 million Pikachu card is, unsurprisingly, mentioned, but the expert also suggests that “getting interest into it is good for prices in the short term, but what’s the long-term outcome? Someone sells the rarest Pokémon today, and a couple of years from now we’re in a Pokémon winter where prices collapse. They’re still rich and arguably sold at the top.”
I’m not an investor, nor am I a financial advisor. I am a Pokémon card collector and a journalist, but I have spoken to investors who have spent years collecting TCG products for their potential future value. One look at Pokémon’s history shows that this rollercoaster of stock selling out and prices surging isn’t uncommon—it’s happened multiple times, even during COVID, but it has been heightened by social media and the big 30th Celebration release, alongside a big TCG Pocket-sized hype period. I believe things will cool down in the near future, although whether that means stock issues will continue for the foreseeable future remains unclear.
It’s hard to be excited for upcoming content, even when the Pokémon TCG has a big year ahead in 2027, when value drives stock off shelves consistently. In some ways, I hope the scalpers do eventually push prices so high that they inevitably crash—that means we’d finally be able to get some cards for our binders. The recent drop in price for a Lugia ex card, which isn’t even the full art from the 2013 set, hopefully means that card values will continue to go down. Although who knows how long that will take.
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