T. K. Arispe

 Stamps definitely won't get you any closer to the Pokémon League. Baseball cards, on the other other hand...

Speaking of, can we talk for a minute about the Pokémon TCG and the controversy surrounding all the card scalping that's been going on over the past few years? 

I understand why collectors are upset that demand for Pokémon TCG products constantly exceeds supply and unscrupulous botters snatch up new releases online, but (at the risk of sounding insensitive), at the end of the day, is it really a big deal whether or not you get that cool new collector's set? Is it vital to your survival? People all over the world struggle on a daily basis to get their basic physical needs met, and instead of being grateful that, unlike a large percentage of humanity, you have so much money that you can afford food, a home, clothes, hygiene, and still have enough left over for your hobby of hoarding shiny card stock, you're complaining that you can't get the shiny card stock you want the day it comes out.

Maybe let's step back and reevaluate our priorities. Pokémon is a fun franchise. It's nostalgic for us adults who grew up with it. I get that TCG collecting brings satisfaction to a segment of fans who can afford that sort of thing. But it is definitely not the most important part of life. And while I understand that it's frustrating when you want something fun and you can't get it right away, if you blow that out of proportion and turn it into a crusade, to me that just seems a little materialistic and entitled.

Which is why I'm also not on board with the idea that the TCG scalping is bad for younger collectors. First off, very few kids are hardcore collectors like adults are. My 10-year-old niece enjoys collecting TCG cards, but she definitely doesn't care whether or not she can find the latest collector's set in stock anywhere, or how much cards are going for on the secondhand market. She's just happy when she gets a new card - any new card - and she adds it to her binder and then goes on with her day, because she has other things to enjoy about life, like family and friends and playing the guitar and writing poetry and going outside and touching grass. 

Also, if a kid does want a specific TCG product and can't get it right away, that's not a bad thing. In fact, it's a really great lesson about how life is not about getting everything you want, right when you want it, and acquiring anything of value requires hard work, patience, and perseverance. Learning that with trading cards when they're young helps prepare children for similar situations with school, careers, cultivating skills, acquiring and maintaining healthy relationships, and raising kids of their own. I think it's a mistake to assume that a child being deprived of a luxury item is an unfortunate event in their life. Talk to anyone who lived through the Great Depression and you'll hear a lot of stories about how life was tough, but in those circumstances, those kids learned how to be hard workers, to be self-reliant, responsible, and money-wise, and how to adult better than 2020s kids who sit around staring at streaming-on-demand TV and making ChatGPT do their homework.

When the Pokémon TCG first came out, for the first few years I collected and played it pretty avidly. But as I got older, I realized just how much money was going into all those booster packs and theme decks and trying to complete each set (with new sets coming out every few months), and all I was really getting out of it was a growing pile of binders in my closet, and I decided it just wasn't bringing me joy, so I stepped away from the whole thing. 

Stuff doesn't bring happiness, and the temporary dopamine rush from acquiring something isn't an effective substitute for relationships, self-care, and using your time and means to make the world a better place--in other words, all the things that make us really human. (Charles Dickens's masterful character portrait of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol is a perfect example of a person who decided to let the acquisition of money become his sole goal in life, and it detrimentally affected not only him, but all the people around him whose lives he could have improved both materially and with the pleasure of his friendship.)

Collecting can be fun, but don't let it become an obsession, and don't waste your time or energy making a big deal out of something inconsequential. The collectibles market is notoriously fickle, and it's entirely possible that a year from now, the Pokémon TCG will have fallen out of favor with the botters and they'll move on to scalping something else. (Something similar happened when the TCG first came out, and we all survived.) In the meantime, there are far, far better things to do with your life than repeatedly post indignant things on the Internet about non-issues. Go spend time with an elderly person, or learn to bake, or take up birdwatching, or maybe take all of that spare money you have lying around and put it toward charitable causes instead of shiny card stock. Go live.

Footnote: As much as I'm not fond of Pokémon TCG Pocket, I know a lot of people are big fans of the game, and part of me wonders if one of the reasons The Pokémon Company released the game was to give TCG fans a virtual card collecting experience that couldn't be sabotaged by scalpers. So at least people have that. And pixels on your phone take up way less closet space anyway.