Why Is It So Hard to Buy Pokemon Right Now?

We got back into this hobby late in 2025, and here's the thing nobody warns you about: the hardest part isn't pulling the card you want. It's buying the pack in the first place.

Every time a new set or collection drops, it's been an uphill battle just to get our hands on it at a price that makes sense. And as a dad, that stings in a specific way. I'm not trying to flip anything. I just want to grab some product at a fair price and open it with my kids on the living room floor. That's the whole hobby for us.

It shouldn't be this hard.

What makes it worse is watching where all that product actually goes. Open up Whatnot on a launch night and you'll see a wall of those same collections — the ones you couldn't find anywhere — getting hyped and sold in breaks against cheap filler packs. (We wrote up our honest take on that whole scene here.) It's hard not to feel like the collecting community is the thing being sold, not the cards.

The hunt just to have fun

Sometimes we get lucky. We'll stumble on a few packs in a Pokémon vending machine at the grocery store, or our local card shop will have gotten enough supply to actually stock what we need at a normal price. Those are good days, and shout-out to the local shops fighting the good fight to keep prices fair.

But that's the part that wears on you: those are the lucky days. The baseline is having to hunt hard just to take part in your own hobby. Checking three stores. Setting alerts. Driving across town on a rumor. For something that's supposed to be fun, that's a whole lot of work before the fun even starts.

Bots and scalpers: the online mess

Then there's buying online, which is its own special kind of frustrating. No matter how fast you are, you're never fast enough — the bots and scalpers clear the shelf in seconds. And what really gets me is that it isn't even hidden anymore. Scroll social media, and you'll find people openly showing off their bot setups, bragging about checkout speeds, and selling those tools to other people like it's a normal business.

The scarcity isn't an accident. For a lot of folks, it is the product.

Take me back to the 90s

I'll admit part of this is just me being nostalgic. Back in the 90s, you could walk into a shop, and there was plenty, any day of the week. You grabbed what looked cool and went home. No queues, no bots, no "notify me when it's back in stock."

Maybe we'll get back to something like that one day. But heading into the 30th anniversary, with demand about to spike even harder, I think it's an uphill climb until retailers figure out a better way to get product into the hands of the people who actually want to open it.

So here's what we do about it

We stopped fighting every launch. Instead, we lean into the sets that are actually available and reasonably priced — like Surging Sparks, which is where we've put our master-set focus. (That chase turned into a whole thing — here's how we accidentally started a master set.) The singles market has settled, the packs are findable, and we can just… enjoy it. Which was the point the whole time.

If getting product has been a battle for you too, you're not imagining it, and you're not alone. Come tell us over on our YouTube channel where you've had luck — or where you've been burned. We're all hunting the same shelves.