I vaguely remember reading an article at the height of the Nintengo cartridges valuation craze a few years back, that the guys behind the "grading" corporation which produced these insane valuations, were previously convicted scammers who went bust in dotcom and decided to try again.

This whole story about assigning millions of dollars of value based on a state of ten cents worth of cardboard and shrink wrap is craziness. Same with obsessing about the imperfections on the playing cards.

It's literally a card game. You can argue the utility and use case are stupid, or wildly less than the cost would suggest, but it's silly to say there is no utility, even if most collectors don't play the game.

>infinite printing supply

Much like other collectibles all the most valuable cards are so long out of print that even if they were reprinted exactly as they were they would not receive the same valuation by the collectors because they are not the originals.

But the boom in old pokemon cards still drove demand for modern pokemon cards so much so that more pokemon cards have been printed post 2020 than the two decades before it despite the fact that “rare” cards you can obtain in new sets only go for hundreds to thousands at most and yet people still gamble on new pokemon card packs.

It's kind of funny to see the Pokemon card vending machines at various grocery stores.

Today I went to a hardware store, and was humourously-surprised to find a Pokemon card vending machine there too.

Infinite theoretical printing supply. In reality, that specific really cool Charizard from my childhood stopped being printed decades ago, and natural wear and tear reduces the supply compared to 1999 (or whenever it was printed). Nostalgia kicks in, demand skyrockets. I don't know why Pokemon specifically did this, but it's far from the first trading card series to have this effect.

As for utility: it's still entertainment. remember that this is a TCG, so there technically is still a formatted game to play with these cards. Even if most effects in older cards have been long irrelevant in competitive formats, other TCG's can have card prices surge due to new strategies being discovered.

This is an awful take as beanie babies were always predicted to be collectors items but failed to reach that status.

Pokemon cards, on the other hand, are veritable collectors items, like stamps or baseball cards.

Like baseball cards, their value comes from a combination of rarity and nostalgia.

> without any utility or valid use case whatsoever.

Pokemon battles have some amount of entertainment value.

I mean sure, it's glorified cock fighting for kids, but that doesn't diminish the utility of the game as entertainment. It just makes it squishier.