Official Pokémon Center retail stores are turning to new tactics to combat an immense wave of Pokémon TCG resale activity. For months, the Pokémon Trading Card Game has dealt with an explosion of demand, with many stores selling out of any available stock very quickly. This demand was made worse by an uptick in reselling, both through online retailers and at in-person stores.

To combat some of this resale problem, Pokémon Center retail stores in Japan and Singapore have turned to pulling off the packaging of sealed booster boxes (via VGC). The purpose of this is to dissuade scalpers, as they can no longer guarantee that their products weren't tampered with or altered in some way. As Singapore's Pokémon Center stores sells English-language cards, this marks the first time that international Pokémon TCG product has been impacted by this extraordinary step.

Players Who Collect Sealed Products May Be Unhappy

Breaking Open Sealed Product Immediately Lowers Its Secondary Selling Price, Which Is Precisely The Point

Opening a booster box's plastic packaging has been common practice in Japan for several years. The move targets resellers by making it so they can't guarantee an untampered product when they try to resell it. As most collectors open up the plastic packaging before breaking open packs, the practice is relatively harmless as long as you're looking to collect individual cards.

While normal collectors aren't affected by this move, it does impact the growing number of "sealed collectors." These collectors are essentially holding back product for long periods of time in the hopes that scarcity and demand will continue to rise. Due to the nature of card collecting, a sealed package is typically far more valuable than the cards inside. After all, the possibility of a booster box containing a Shadowless Charizard or a Moonbreon is far more valuable than a guarantee that the cards don't appear in the pack.

Pokémon TCG's Massive Popularity Has Made It More Complicated To Play

The Surge In Demand Makes It Impossible To Get New Pokémon Cards

The recent surge in scalping has made it pretty miserable to be a Pokémon Trading Card Game fan. With fights breaking out at various big-box retailers and widespread complaints over Pokémon vending machines, it feels like scalping has become as big of a problem as it was during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There's very few available booster pack products out there that aren't being sold for a . Large retailers have their stock sell out quickly, and online stores (including the online Pokémon Center store) sell out in seconds thanks to bots. It's made the game very unfun very quickly and calls for desperate measures. Hopefully, the Pokémon TCG can increase supply considerably over the next few months, or a lot of fans are going to miss out on some fun sets.

Source: VGC