Pokémon has been huge since the late 90s. Millions of people have fond memories of playing the original Red and Blue games, or trading cards in the playground for that elusive shiny Charizard (if your school didn’t ban them). The franchise has only grown since then – but, where the trading cards are concerned, things have taken an unexpected and unfortunate turn. It’s now almost impossible to get your hands on newly released cards thanks to an insane rise in reselling and scalping over the past year.

Selling on your old cards to collectors has always been part of the hobby, and like baseball cards or Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon cards can sometimes go for thousands of pounds. However, the resale market for Pokémon has climbed so high that even new cards are valued at hundreds, before they’ve even been released. The latest set, Phantasmal Flames, had a rare special illustration Charizard that was being valued at more than £600 before anyone had even found one. When a pack of cards retails at about £4, there’s a huge potential profit to be had.

This has led to a speculative stock market developing around the card game with adults snapping up all of the cards they can get their hands on, making it impossible for kids, who may actually want to collect them or play the game associated with the cards, to get their hands on it.

Online, via retailers such as Amazon, you can only request to buy Pokémon cards, after which everyone is entered into an opaque raffle for the chance to buy them. In the real world, meanwhile, resellers will queue for hours outside shops, hover around shelves as they’re being restocked and buy up every item before anyone else can see it – all just to buy boxes that are often kept sealed for later resale.

“My staff have had customers threatening to come back and rip their heads off,” says Ben Thyer, owner of BathTCG – an independent shop specialising in trading card games. “It’s become quite unpleasant at times. I’ve heard of other stores where people have been attacked or there have been robberies. We’ve even seen people who buy our products and list them immediately on Facebook, while still in our carrier bags, or sell it right outside the shop. We’re even anxious to put stuff on the shelf for the public because we just don’t want to entice that sort of behaviour. We used to sell whole boxes of booster packs but now we’ve had to stop doing that, and even place limits on the individual packs.”

Finley Pink, from Keynsham, travelled to BathTCG to arrive almost two hours before opening time to secure some cards at the recent launch of the Phantasmal Flames set. He was first in a line of 40 people. “This is the first set I’ve arrived early for, as I’ve been unable to get cards at other times. It’s a real struggle to find them,” he tells us. “Scalpers are making it impossible to find cards. It’s crazy and YouTubers talking up the money are making things even crazier!”

Adding to the issue of scalpers is the popularity of YouTubers and TikTok influencers recording themselves opening packs, flicking through the contents at mesmerising speed, and listing the card values as they go, exaggerating reactions when they find a “hit”. Common cards are discarded, and only high-value cards matter. The joy of collecting or playing for fun is no longer the point – it’s all about maximising “value”.

Pete Sessions, a project manager from Bristol, attended a Pokémon play night at the shop with his son Alfie and is concerned about influencers’ impact on the hobby for his child. “He’s been into Pokémon for a few years, but just got into collecting the cards over the past six months – I’ve had to ask shops when their stock drop days are just to try to find some,” he tells us. “Alfie watches YouTubers and he’s become very aware of the ‘value’ of cards. I’m worried about the perception that it’s easy to make loads of money, when that probably isn’t the case.”

“People are opening these amazing cards on stream, but you don’t know how many thousands of packs they’ve probably gone through, or how much money they’ve spent,” adds Thyer. “So then they feed you the good stuff – that dopamine hit – and you think: ‘Oh, I can do that!’ And then you spend a silly amount of money hoping to get one hit.”

The hype around potentially making hundreds of pounds by just opening a pack of cards has resulted in a volatile market, to the point that people now use apps such as Collectr to track their card portfolio for price rises and falls. It’s also led to devious practices such as selling fake cards, or opening and resealing packs after swapping out any rare cards.

And that’s all before the added layer of the card-grading industry comes into play. Cards can be sent to independent organisations, who rate and seal cards to potentially increase their value, depending on the grade they’re given. Card shows have now become a staple up and down the country, where hobbyists looking for their favourite cards are surrounded by those making trade deals worth, sometimes, tens of thousands.

Despite the fact that The Pokémon Company printed 10.2bn cards in the year to March 2025, they’re still struggling to keep up with demand. When approached for comment, it shared a statement from seven months ago, saying that the company is “actively working to print more of the impacted Pokémon TCG products as quickly as possible and at maximum capacity”.

Fortunately there are signs that the reseller market is starting to correct itself as more supply for older sets has started to trickle back on to shelves. “There are signs of the market cracking – prices of singles are coming down, sealed products are coming down. People aren’t as ferocious as they once were,” Thyer says. “There’s also a lot of people now thinking, ‘Christmas is soon and I need some money because I’ve not made what I was hoping for [from reselling cards]’. So we’ll see it dip, but then early 2026 brings Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, so I think we’ll see another crazy period.”

While many shops have now adjusted booster pack pricing to reflect their perceived value and make the most of the Pokémon card boom, BathTCG refuses to give into that temptation. “We won’t do it to our customers,” Thyer says. “It’s hard as a business owner to say, ‘I don’t want to make more money’, but I don’t want to be another one of those shops remembered for scalping. Once the bubble bursts and everything goes back to normal, hopefully people will remember that we protected our community and looked after our players – that we ensured our local customers got cards at reasonable prices.”