A small group formed around the Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) Vending Machine at the Campus Plaza Albertsons on April 17. The screen was dark, with a loading User Interface (UI), and the machine rebooted. An Adidas duffel bag had been placed in front of the machine, under its dispenser slot. Eagerly, the group waited for the machine to reboot, until an error screen popped up — a sleeping Snorlax and Pikachu appearing on the screen to indicate that the machine had gone down.
Pokémon cards have recently grown beyond being simply collectables that are sought after by children and fans of the franchise because of the rise of scalping as a threat to many casual buyers. From adults fighting one another in Costco over boxes of cards, such as in a video uploaded by the New York Post, to hordes of adults waiting outside retail stores like GameStop and Best Buy before opening, it seems like everyone wants to snatch up as many cards as they can get their hands on. Many of these die-hard buyers are not interested in the cards themselves, but rather in the resale value that they possess online, leading fans to label them “scalpers.”
Following a new drop, buyers quickly find that if they try to purchase the newly released boxes of cards online, they will be met with heavily inflated prices. Resellers — or scalpers — will have already scooped up the newest Elite Trainer Boxes (ETBs) to resell for a profit. Pokémon’s upcoming ETB “Pokémon TCG: Mega Evolution – Chaos Rising,” which is set to release on May 22, demonstrates the difficulty of trying to buy a box, with pre-orders for the ETB already out of stock on the Pokémon Center website. Despite being initially sold for $59.99, Chaos Rising pre-ordered boxes are already being resold on websites such as TCGPlayer for a starting price of $114.35 each as of April 22.
Over on the r/PokemonTCG subreddit, a forum on Reddit dedicated to Pokémon TCG, user jeffthrowonemore expressed his disappointment with scalpers in a post titled “Scalping is ruining the hobby” and attached an image of a collection of hundreds of dollars worth of boxes atop a table, presumably for resale.
Scalpers are not the only ones driving up card prices, though. Gaming merchandise retailers like GameStop also appear to be selling cards for much higher than their original price range. Prismatic Evolutions, an ETB with an original Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) of $59.99, being sold on GameStop’s website for $149.99 a box as of April 23.
Pokémon TCG collector and longtime fan of the franchise, Nicholas Garcia, first began collecting when he was only ten years old. Recently, he took notice of the shift in card pricing at his local GameStop in Victorville, Calif. He even struck up a conversation with the cashier over his disappointment in the inflation of card prices at the retailer.
“I used to go to GameStop, but the prices changed,” Garcia told New University. “So now I go online.”
Garcia also expressed having his fair share of less-than-pleasant experiences with scalpers in-person, describing how their strategy of gathering as many cards as possible means he gets nothing.
“They’re nice at first,” he said, “But they take all the cards, and so they don’t really leave anything for anybody else.”
His statement represents the many fan complaints about how scalping turns the hobby of card collecting into an arms-race against resellers — people simply looking to grab and resell the same boxes of cards online at a higher price point. Fans are left to either scrounge over what’s left, or cave into purchasing their cards online from scalpers for multiples of the original MSRP. Retailers like GameStop seem to be cashing in as well, upcharging their customers to match resellers’ prices. It appears that fans and everyday shoppers looking to purchase cards for their kids — the target audience of Pokémon — are being outpaced and outpriced into leaving stores and machines empty-handed.
Juliana Maldonado is an Arts & Entertainment Intern for the spring 2026 quarter. She can be reached at jrmaldo1@uci.edu.
Edited by June Min and Riley Schnittger
