Overview:
Pokémon card prices have been inflated by scalpers buying up packs and reselling them at exorbitant prices, but some are fighting back.
Weekend mornings at La Plaza off East Colfax in Aurora are typically pretty quiet. The crowds haven’t made their way to the Hispanic marketplace and food hall yet, except for one major outlier. In the far back corner of the market sits a small event space, packed to the gills with people who are looking to buy, sell and trade collectibles.
Jamie Bigbee of East Denver is one of the collectors who frequents La Plaza’s Colorado Collectible Show, jam-packed with collectors’ items like trading cards, Labubus and action figures. Like most, Bigbee is there on the hunt for one thing only: Pokémon cards.
“I’d say Pokémon cards are 95% of what’s being sold at [Colorado Collectible Show],” Bigbee said. “Pokémon cards are what the collectors are looking for. They’re so popular right now. They are king.”
Vendors support Bigbee’s claim of Pokémon’s popularity at the moment, and it’s been that way for quite some time. While Pokémon cards have always been popular, their popularity got a big boost during the COVID-19 pandemic after celebrities like Logan Paul publicly got into the hobby. Since then, the popularity of the trading card game has stayed strong.
Bigbee, who’s been collecting Pokémon cards on and off since he was a kid, got a nostalgia blast and decided to get back into the hobby around a year ago and hasn’t looked back.
“My favorite part about collecting is seeing how everyone has a very unique collection,” Bigbee said. “In the Pokémon card community, everyone likes different things. Seeing everyone’s passion for trading and getting new cards is really fun for me. You hear crazy stories from different people in the community about nice deals they’ve done or old cards that they found.”
What Bigbee wasn’t told when he got back into card collecting as a hobby is that if you want to find Pokémon cards in Denver nowadays, La Plaza is one of your few reliable options. That’s because the community is facing a major problem: scalpers.
“The scalping situation within the Pokémon card community is awful,” Bigbee said. “Packs only cost $5 at store retail prices, but scalpers come in and buy up as much product as they can to corner the market. They mark the packs up to $10 or $15. Everyone who wants to buy cards is forced to buy from scalpers, which continues to keep the price inflated.”
Tom Waggett of Boulder is another collector who’s fed up with scalpers invading his hobby of collecting Pokémon cards. He says that the only place he can consistently find Pokémon cards in the Denver metro is either at La Plaza or a local card store, but like Bigbee, he says that convenience comes at a price.
“If you go into a store like Target, Walmart or Best Buy, there’s a 99% chance [Pokémon cards] are going to be out of stock,” Waggett said. “If you actually want to buy cards, you need to go to either a card store or La Plaza on the weekend, but everything is marked up pretty significantly. It’s making this hobby pretty expensive.”
Because English-language Pokémon cards are manufactured in the United States, they are unaffected by tariffs, meaning the problem is entirely caused by resellers creating artificial scarcity. Bigbee says that things have gotten so bad that people are camping out in front of stores all night ahead of restocks, just to ensure they can continue to keep prices high and make a quick buck.
“The big retail stores always have long lines waiting for the store to open at 7 a.m. after restocks,” Bigbee said. “They somehow know about when cards are getting restocked and make sure to buy it all so no one else has access to it.”
To Bigbee, the worst part about the current state of the Pokémon card community is that it’s becoming inaccessible to its target audience: children.
“If you’re a kid who just wants to find [Pokémon cards], you’re gonna get outbid by some 40-year-old scalper who doesn’t have a job,” Bigbee said. “It just makes it very difficult to get into it. It’s a constant battle between collectors and scalpers.”
Waggett reports similar findings, saying that the inflated price of entry has shifted the community’s demographic altogether.
“I definitely don’t think [Pokémon card collecting] is a kids’ hobby or a kids’ game anymore,” Waggett said. “I will say that the trading card community is definitely on the older-leaning side now because of access to products and market prices turning it into a business instead of just a hobby for people to enjoy.”
Still, not everyone sees it that way. One Pokémon vendor at La Plaza, who requested anonymity due to recent harassment targeted at resellers, says that it’s sometimes hard to run a business selling cards due to low profit margins.
“On occasion, it’s not very profitable,” said the vendor at La Plaza. “You can probably make 15 to 100 bucks per sale on some things, but it’s also rare to get those.”
The same vendor did concede that the potential of making a significant profit on the Pokémon card market is there, but it’s time-consuming and requires lots of effort.
“I’ve seen scalpers make a lot of money, especially through streaming apps and bidding apps like TikTok and Whatnot, but it’s not easy,” the vendor said. “You have to dedicate your whole life to finding packs, up-charging them and selling them. It can be done, but it’s a full-time job, and most of us do this on the side. We don’t have the time for that.”
Pokémon cards aren’t the only product being hit hard by artificially inflated prices. Labubus, which retails for around $28, can be found at the Colorado Collectors Show for between $50 and $70. Other packs of trading card games, such as Magic: The Gathering, One Piece Trading Cards and Disney’s Lorcana, can be found at La Plaza for higher than thee manufacturer’s suggested retail price, but they are still nowhere near the 100 percent or more markup that Pokémon cards are frequently priced at.
“Things have definitely gotten better recently,” Waggett said. “Places have gotten better about enforcing purchase limits, which has made a difference. It’s still really hard to find packs in the wild, but it feels like we are headed in the right direction.”
As collectors continue to push back against scalpers and reclaim their space, many hope the Pokémon card community can return to what it once was—a hobby built on fun, not profit.
“I just want this hobby to be accessible to anyone and everyone who wants to join,” Bigbee said. That’s not the case right now, and it’s really unfortunate. We want things to go back to normal. That’s the ultimate goal.”
