Perceived Rarity is Not True Rarity

One of the most dangerous traps in collecting is misunderstanding perceived versus true rarity.

In modern collectibles, true rarity is, well, rare: it’s the true grail pieces like Illustrator Pikachu, the Pokémon Snap promos, and the Gold Star cards.

These truly rare pieces are widely known and fetch extremely high prices as a result.

But, in modern collectibles it’s rare for items to be truly rare.

Modern trading card games, like Pokémon, are designed to create the illusion of rarity. Sets are constructed with hard-to-find chase cards that are only found in one out of thousands of booster packs, making them incredibly challenging, and expensive, to find by organically buying and opening packs.

Take the famous Moonbreon alt art card from Evolving Skies: estimated at a 1 in 1,000 pack hit, assuming you could find Evolving Skies packs at their $3.99 MSRP price, you’d pay $4,000 for the chance to open those 1,000 packs.

But at today’s market price of about $25 per TCG Player… those 1,000 packs would cost you an eye-watering $25,000…

It’s not surprising that collectors are instead willing to pay well over $1,000 for a raw copy of this card, and more than $2,500 for a PSA 10 example: when cost of organically pulling a card from packs is so high, the high market price seems justified.

But the reality is that the Pokémon Company prints billions of cards each year, and the true supply of these chase cards ends up being in the tens to hundreds of thousands of copies.

The Moonbreon alone now has more than 23,800 graded examples on the PSA pop report (up from about 15,000 back in May 2024 when I first started covering the Moonbreon…) And how many more copies of this card go into collection binders and never make it to the public pop reports?

This is not a truly rare card.

Instead, the booster pack distribution model creates the illusion of scarcity - perceived scarcity - which is compounded by the massive demand for Pokémon cards. All the collectors who covet this card make it seem even rarer than it actually is.

There is certainly massive demand for chase cards like the Moonbreon that help justify their high prices. It’s just that the way the Pokémon Company distributes them through booster packs creates a higher perception of rarity than their true rarity.

But modern chase cards are just one way perceived rarity dominates modern collectibles markets.

It’s also what makes buyouts successful.

In last week’s newsletter, I explored the recent buyout of the Greninja Gold Star promo from Celebrations Elite Trainer Boxes. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more the power (and risk) of perceived rarity took hold.

A successful buyout drives awareness of, and demand for, a card by creating the illusion of rarity. The perpetrators drive perceived rarity by buying out all copies of the card. As they do, they create the impression that the card is truly rare.

When successful, the market catches wind of the suddenly scarce card and this perceived rarity drives a wave a market FOMO drives aggressive buying of newly listed copies at increasingly high prices.

The problem with buyouts is that all of this price action is driven by misinformation: the card is not actually rare. The high prices will not last because, as the card fetches higher and higher prices, more collectors and investors will find their copies of the card and list them for sale, flooding the market with new supply that brings the price back down to earth.

Buyouts like this feed on perceived rarity and exploit it. And the victims are often the less experienced collectors who simply don’t know better and get swept up in the hype.

Since writing about the Greninja Gold Star buyout last week, we’ve already seen a sharp correction in the market price from the highs, at least when looking at the TCG Player data on pokedata.io.

This is why it’s so important to be aware of perceived rarity: the market responds to the feeling of rarity, and we should all act accordingly.

As usual,

Thank you 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 🍻