The Economics of Buyouts in Pokémon

Everywhere I look, one message has dominated the social media landscape of this booming Pokémon market:

Buyouts.

Buyouts are nothing new: for as long as there’s been a secondary market for Pokémon cards, there’s been opportunities for buyouts. However, ever since the 2020 Pandemic Boom, the issue of buyouts has become more extreme. And, despite widespread coverage of buyouts, most collectors don’t understand what’s actually happening: the true goal of a buyout.

To begin, we first need to understand the economics of supply, which are manipulated in a buyout.

How Pokémon Card Supply Really Works

Here are some important definitions for different types of supply that are essential to understanding buyouts:

1. Stock: the total supply (e.g. every Moonbreon printed).

2. Market Supply: what’s currently listed for sale at today’s prices.

3. Potential Supply: additional copies that could hit the market if prices rise.

In Pokémon, we’ll never know the true Stock of any one card: this data isn’t made public. And, although we have some ways of estimating Stock (for example: population reports from grading companies give us a clue), this will always be nothing more than a guess.

But, the price we pay for any given card isn’t directly related to the Stock anyway: it’s based on the Market Supply, which is the supply that is actually available to purchase at the current market price.

The last type of supply, Potential Supply, is the potential new supply that would come to market at higher prices. This supply has an important impact on buyouts, but more on that later.

The key to collectibles markets is realizing that Market Supply is usually thin, meaning it represents a small fraction of the Stock. Think about it: collectors and investors tend to horde their collectibles. As a result, the majority of the Stock remains sealed in unopened product or locked up in collectors’ binders.

The result is a relatively small number of items on the open market, and this thin supply is what enables buyouts. Manipulators don’t need to control the entire Stock, they simply need to buyout the Market Supply. And by clearing out active listings, they create the illusion of scarcity (artificial scarcity), and can begin relisting the items they bought at higher prices, triggering a price spike.

The rising prices created by a buyout will eventually draw in the Potential Supply. Even though collectors and investors tend to horde, a sharp spike in prices is sure to motivate some to dig up their copies and list them for sale. The problem is, it takes time for the Potential Supply to show up. In the meantime, manipulators profit in the gap between the price spike and the flood of new listings.

Manipulating the Market Supply is the mechanism by which market manipulators create a buyout.

But, as I said: it’s not the end goal.

The goal of this supply-side manipulation is for it to be a catalyst for something much more enduring: a positive cultural narrative for the card…

And therefore demand for it.

Example of Buyouts Creating Demand

Here’s an example of what I mean by this: the full art Jesse & James card from Hidden Fates.

For years, this card seemed to be stuck around the $15 market price. Until, in January of 2025, it experienced a sudden surge in price, rising all the way to a market price of $67.30 on TCGPlayer: a more than 400% gain from the earlier $15 price.

This rapid price rise occurred alongside a significant spike in card sales. Prior to this boom, there were typically 15-20 weekly sales of this card. And, in one week, as the price surged more than 400%, there were 99 sales on TCGPlayer alone.

The combination of massive price increases off the back of a huge spike in sales is a strong indicator that this price action is the result of a buyout.

But, what happened next is perhaps even more interesting.

Because, if nothing changed beyond a short-term manipulation of the supply for this card, we’d expect the price to spike drastically as the Market Supply was bought out, but then see a correction back to pre-buyout prices as the Potential Supply hit the market.

But Jessie & James did nothing of the sort…

After the initial buyout surge, prices for this card slowly fell from the $67.30 high over the following months, bottoming at $38.19 in June 2025. This price as nowhere near the $15 pre-buyout price: it is 250% more! This alone tells us that the market’s perception of this card has changed. But it continues: since June, the price has actually been on the rise again clawing back to a market price of $51.88 at the time I’m writing this: a 333% gain on the pre-buyout price.

This new market price tells us something important: the Pokémon market values this card more highly than it did before the manipulation. It’s as if the rising price shocked the market out of its ignorance and established the true value of this card.

We’ve seen this story play out multiple times throughout the current Boom Phase. Shortly after the Jessie & James full art buyout, we saw a buyout on the Drowzee Illustration Rare card from Scarlet & Violet base. In this case, the card surged from a $14-15 pre-buyout price to an astonishing high of $63.33, before crashing within weeks to $39, and then bottoming around $23 a few months later.

Still higher than the pre-buyout price…

And, today, the market price has creeped back up to $33.92, showing that this buyout too has managed to shift the cultural narrative for this card and drive more demand, and therefore higher prices, for it.

And there are many more examples.

Like it or not: collectors value more expensive cards more highly. And, in a buyout, market manipulators seek to exploit this tendency to permanently drive up the valuation of the cards they target.

This is the true goal of a buyout.

This isn’t to say that I condone market manipulation and buyouts, far from it (I dislike all of these tactics). But, I think we can learn a lot about collectibles markets by studying manipulation like this.

Collectibles markets are driven by culture, and to navigate them successfully we need to understand the forces that drive culture, both the good and the bad. Market manipulation is unfortunately not going anywhere: we can’t be shocked by it when it occurs. Instead, we should strive to develop a better understanding of what’s going on, so we can make better decisions with our hard-earned money, despite the manipulation.

As usual,

Thanks 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. I’m trying to share more on X (Twitter) these days, so if don’t already give me a follow to receive more of my in-progress thoughts about the Pokémon market and collecting in general: @greythompson