How I Lost $1,000 on Pokémon Cards, and Won

Almost a year ago I shared how I lost $1,000 buying Amazing Rare cards…

And the story went viral.

Not only did it get hundreds of thousands of views on X, but Danny Phantump also discussed my post in one of his videos. You can see what he had say here:

I had built my Amazing Rare collection in January 2022, spending about $1,200 CAD to buy 18 copies of each of the 9 cards. By October 2024, when I made my viral post, the market value of those cards had plummeted to $200 CAD: a more than 80% loss.

What made it worse was I thought I did everything right: the Amazing Rare cards were more than a year old and had dropped more than 50% in value from their previous high prices.

I thought I’d been patient, watched the market, and built my position when the market corrected. I knew the card values might go lower, but how much lower could they really go?

I did not expect to be left with $1 for every $5 I spent.

This was how I learned, the hard way, of the importance of the Collectibles Cycle, and the riskiness of buying during the Boom Phase. For a set released during the Boom, the fall from the top can be devastating.

But, it also taught me so much more: the power of of human cognitive biases. In this case, the Price-Quality Heuristic.

As a reminder (and an introduction for my new readers): the Price-Quality Heuristic is our tendency to believe higher-priced objects are more valuable. We see this all the time with products like luxury goods, but it’s especially interesting when applied to the secondary market for Pokémon cards.

When Amazing Rare cards were introduced to the Pokémon community in November of 2020, collectors loved them. New collectors might not realize that, at the time, chase cards were limited to full art Pokémon and Trainer cards, plus the odd gold Hyper Rare card. Amazing Rare cards offered something completely different: a classic card style, with a standard card frame and details, that was elevated by the bright colors and textures of modern cards.

This was before the return of alt art cards and was, honestly, a breath of fresh air. Just look at how excited UnlistedLeaf was pulling his first Amazing Rare card on Nov 3, 2020:

But, even more importantly, the pandemic boom kicked off shortly after the release of Vivid Voltage, creating a surge in collectors who wanted to rip packs. With that surge in demand, the supply of sealed Vivid Voltage simply couldn’t keep up and prices for the set, and all chase cards within it, were high from the start.

For example, I remember the most popular Amazing Rare card, the Rayquaza, was being sold for as much as $40-50 shortly after release.

But, by the end of 2021 the Pokémon Company finally released reprints of affected sets, including Vivid Voltage. When I started buying the Rayquaza for around $10 USD in early 2022, I thought I was getting a deal. And yet, the supply of Vivid Voltage seemed to be infinite, and the market price kept falling further and further.

That’s how, in October 2024, that same Amazing Rare Rayquaza had a market price closer to $3.

And as the price fell, collectors changed their tune. The excitement surrounding Amazing Rare cards when they were new and expensive disappeared. In 2024, when the card was cheap, the sentiment had completely shifted. I swear no one cared about Amazing Rare cards anymore.

This is the impact of the Price-Quality Heuristic: we can’t help but feel like cheaper objects are of lower quality.

But the inverse is also true: the current Boom Phase has finally caused prices of Amazing Rare cards to increase again. With these rising prices, we’ve also seen the appreciation for these cards return:

Even better: the value of my Amazing Rare collection has increased significantly from the low prices I shared less than one year ago.

In fact, according to the market prices from the COLLECTR app, my Amazing Rare collection is now worth $1,341 CAD, putting me officially $135 in profit!

Now, I’ve never sold my Amazing Rare cards. I stuck with them because I genuinely think they’re amazing cards (pun intended).

But, I also remembered the excitement the market felt for these cards when they were new, before their prices crashed. And, because I understood the Price-Quality Heuristic, my instinct was that the excitement would return over time, as the cards became more scarce and the price begins to rise again.

Once you’re aware of these kinds of psychological biases, you’ll see it everywhere in collectibles. And you can take action. (Even if that action is to hunker down and keep waiting…)

And, in case you’re wondering: no, I’m not going to be selling my Amazing Rare cards any time soon. I want to see what collectors think about them in another 5 years!

As usual,

Thank you so much for reading the TCG Buyers Club newsletter. My name’s Grey, I buy cardboard, and I’m on a mission to make collecting and investing in Pokémon simple.

Cheers 🍻

P.S. One of the crazy parts about writing this newsletter was revisiting my viral post and re-reading the flood of negative comments I received on it. People on the internet can be mean 😩. But, hopefully you enjoyed it!! 🙏 If you want to take a look yourself, I’ve embedded the post again here: