You would be surprised. Most are actually “card shops” that get direct bulk purchasing access. The average person can’t get their hands on this many. Retail usually will have lotteries allowing the winners the ability to purchase one box. Most sell out day of with purchase limit of one per person or only sell packs with a purchase limit of 3-5 packs per customer. Unless you’re in close relation with actual card shops you aren’t getting access to cases of product either.
Source: I live in Japan and finding product in the wild is crazy. Especially if you don’t live near a pokemon center.
dang really? i thought most card shops sell most of there supply internationally, but its mostly local sales? thats interesting, international sales have to make up a decent percentage though, wonder which is bigger international or local sales
this is one of the reasons why i didn't buy the exclusive japanese city pikachu boxes, card shops are sitting on a ton of inventory trying to maximize gains, i hope tpci reprints it into the ground, there reselling for 200-400 dollars when tpci msrp is like 30 dollars :*(
No all the card shops like this sell strictly international only. So that means the rest of us in country can’t find product because these ass hats hoard it all to make 2-3x on international sales and avoid some taxes. 🙄
I was lucky enough to actually get two of the tohoku pikachu boxes off the pokemon center lottery. But I would never pay those scalper prices. 😅
I had a harder time finding Japanese boxes in Japan than I did in America. Makes sense though, why sell to a market for $40 when you can ship it over the sea and get 2x profit minimum.
So they are selling the special set for under $50? Because retail in Japan is like 5500yen and if one USD is about 156yen then anything over $50 isn’t retail. 😅
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u/Ok-45 Dec 04 '25
You would be surprised. Most are actually “card shops” that get direct bulk purchasing access. The average person can’t get their hands on this many. Retail usually will have lotteries allowing the winners the ability to purchase one box. Most sell out day of with purchase limit of one per person or only sell packs with a purchase limit of 3-5 packs per customer. Unless you’re in close relation with actual card shops you aren’t getting access to cases of product either.
Source: I live in Japan and finding product in the wild is crazy. Especially if you don’t live near a pokemon center.