Drops Are Wearing Us Out, So We Went Hunting for Singles Instead

Keeping track of when Pokémon actually drops has become its own part-time job in this house. Target loves a 2 a.m. restock. Walmart tends to load the digital

shelves around 8 p.m. Pokémon Center just does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, so we end up checking three different sites on three different schedules just to have a shot. Every single one of them turns into the same race: get into the online queue, hope the number moves fast enough, and find out twenty minutes later whether tonight was a win or a wasted alarm.

We have set that alarm more times than we would like to admit. Most of the time it does not pay off, and we go back to bed with nothing to show for it.

The One Queue We Actually Got Into

We have made it into the Pokémon Center queue exactly once. That one time is how we ended up with some of the Pitch Black product we opened this week, including the pack battle that just went up: one of the best SIRs in the set decided who won this Pitch Black Pack Battle. One good queue in who knows how many attempts is not a great hit rate, but it is the only one that counts.

Between the odd hours and the odds themselves, actually getting packs into our hands has become as much of a challenge as pulling anything good out of them once we do. And that is before you factor in duplicates. More than once we have finally landed a slot in a queue, gotten the product, opened it, and pulled a card we already had three of.

So We Started Hunting Singles Instead

That is the real reason we have been leaning harder into local shops lately. This last weekend we made a trip to one of ours and walked out with nearly 100 cards for our Mega Evolutions binder. Most of what we grabbed was base rarity and bulk, and the whole stack together still cost us less than a single booster bundle would have.

We finished several complete pages of the binder in one trip. We are now only a few EX cards away from finishing out the base set, something that felt a lot further off a month ago when we were only counting on whatever showed up in packs. There is a different kind of satisfaction in that too. A finished page from a shop visit feels a lot more certain than a finished page that depends on the next drop actually going our way. We will be logging those into our binder pages here on the site soon, so you can watch the gaps close the same way you have with our other binders.

Our Mega Evolution binder, filling in the reliable way — a weekend of shop singles knocked out several full pages. The base cards are falling fast; it is the last few EX cards, like these, we are still tracking down.

We Are Not Giving Up on Sealed

None of this means we are done ripping packs. There is a real kind of fun in the chase that a single pulled off a shop shelf just cannot recreate, and we are not ready to trade that away completely.

This is the kind of pull that keeps us coming back to sealed product, queues and all.

But we also cannot keep pretending the uphill battle is not there. Between the alarms, the queues, and how hard it has generally been to find product on shelves, the math on singles hunts has just gotten better. It is the same balancing act we talked through in the collector's dilemma post, except now we have a real weekend of results to point at instead of just a theory.

Where That Leaves Us Heading Into the 30th Anniversary

This matters more right now because of what is coming. As we gear up for Pokémon's 30th Celebration, we know demand on that set is going to be enormous, probably bigger than anything we have chased so far. We are going to throw our hat in the ring and see what we can land at MSRP, same as we do for everything else.

What we will not do is pay the 2-3x markups we have already started seeing pop up around it. That is just not our style. If the queues do not go our way and the shelves stay empty, we would rather wait it out and pick up the singles later than pay scalper pricing to skip the line.

So, we are curious where the rest of you land on this. Are you still setting alarms and chasing drops, or have you shifted over to singles hunts like we have? How do you balance sealed versus singles right now? Let us know on X, tag us @Adventure_Coll, or come tell us over on YouTube.