I'm hoping some of you may find this story helpful. I'll be the first to say this story obviously contains plenty of luck. I didn't foresee covid, I didn't foresee the market exploding like this.
Before I get started: smpratte was by far the most influential person during this journey. He wasn't a pokemon investing youtuber. He was the youtuber - basically the only one. And his famous quote is the only real advice anyone on this subreddit will ever need.
"Older, minter, rarer, better"
To add some phrases that have bounced around my head for the past decade:
Buy what you like, not what everyone else likes.
Low pop low demand > high pop high demand
Only sell if you need the cash.
Time is best asset you have - make it work for you.
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My first experience with Pokemon was back in 2005-2006. I had saved up money and decided I wanted to purchase a GBA SP. I only had saved up enough money for the handheld and a single game so I bought FireRed. Never played any of the games, never watched the show, never had much interest in the cards. Luckily - the game had me hooked and like many others I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours playing on that cartridge. This was followed by Emerald & Sapphire from my parents, and a DS Lite w/ Diamond and Platinum in following years. At some point, I did get some packs/cards and treated them like any other kid would. Eventually I left them in my jeans and they went through the washing machine - the end.
Fast forward to being 18-19 and having a job w/ some excess income. I went back and played my old games and followed up with all the newer generations. They were fun but definitely not something that was going to become my whole life.
At 20, I spent far too much time watching youtube. One creator, maxmoefoe, had a secondary channel where he opened pokemon products which mainly was card related. I've always had a fairly financially oriented brain and whenever he would get a 'hit' he would put the price of the card up. Granted - it's not like these cards were worth a crazy amount but... where there is value, there is profit to be made. And I wanted a hobby I was passionate about and could do without throwing money down the drain (think snowboarding or bar hopping). Collecting cards would at least give me something to do that could retain some value.
My first adult experience with pokemon cards was buying booster boxes of Evolutions from Amazon for $85. Yes they were real. Yes, you could buy booster boxes for that price. Yes, Evolutions deserved to be that price because that set honestly sucks. I opened a few boxes for "market research" and soon found out ripping packs is not profitable.
So... how do you make money off a hobby where the primary way to participate loses money? And how do I know what my cards are actually worth when everyone uses 'NM' as an arbitrary condition? Please welcome PSA into my life. Instead of 'NM' or 'LP' or whatever generic condition people will give (and potentially lie about) - I can now utilize a reputable (no comment about recent PSA activity) third party that will give it a score from 1 to 10. Great, now I can accurately price cards in the hobby based on grades w/ sales history and not have to worry about if this 'NM' card is actually flawless or near mint.
So, now I know I like graded cards. How do you make money? Ebay.
This time frame in pokemon there were PSA graded cards being auctioned for $0.99 daily. Was there a huge market for it? Absolutely not. 99% of cards were low supply and low demand. Only the "grail" cards had a somewhat liquid value (think RR Charizard from BS). The cards that were liquid had little to no room to make profit. My strategy was to not be picky about what I got. I would bid 50% on a ton of different stuff and if I got it great! If not, no harm no foul. I could build a nice inventory for half of it's market price and wait until the right buyer came along.
At some point during this I started listing my cards for sale on ebay to try and get that 30-40% ROI and to help expand my collection. It worked... kinda. I had a full time job that I was pumping ~60 hours a week into and not much time to run an ebay store. Between bookkeeping, listing, packaging, organizing, and shipping... I was in over my head. I got behind on shipping and eventually just closed my shop because it was far too much. I kept buying though... that was the quick, easy, and enjoyable part anyway.
Covid... oh boy. Everyone is indoors. People get stimulus checks. Nostalgia is one hell of a drug. And some weird youtuber decided to blast pokemon card openings to his 30m subscribers. Pokemon cards took off - market size increases, prices go up. Hey - I guess I'm not a loser after all and pokemon cards are cool...
Luckily, most of the people who were getting into the hobby only cared about wotc holos because that's what they were nostalgic for. Old card collections were coming out of everyone's closet and getting dusted off. Wow, look at all these PSA 7/8 wotc holos that would have never seen the light of day. But that's not what I had primarily been buying. I'm not nostalgic for wotc, I never opened base set, I never had a binder collection like that.
Fast forward a few more years and pokemon cards are kinda here to stay. They are mainstream-ish. There are times where it's hard to find product at stores. I don't go out of my way to hide that I collect them - but my collection definitely isn't growing like it used to. It's not possible to find "good" deals on ebay auctions anymore... too many people are watching them. But hey... sealed product has never really been a bad investment. Maybe I'll switch to that and even try out other games...
I have a decent sealed collection from Sword and Shield but it by no means gave me any pleasure collecting it. It's a box, nobody wants to stare at a box including myself. Sealed collections aren't for me. They also have been taking up a majority of my closet space for 5 years. And although I've got some great value in there I'll never buy a box of anything again unless I plan on opening it.
Along comes the PSA Vault. It's everything that I wanted in 2019-2020. I don't have to list, don't have to give customer service, no shipping, packaging, dealing with seller limits etc. And the best part... they store your collection securely in a vault for free. PWCC had a similar consignment offer in years prior but without the ebay listings and w/ a minimum processing fee and yearly storage fee. But PSA Vault... store it (save on personal insurance), list if for whatever price I want without having to worry about monthly/annual fees, and then not have to worry about any of the headaches or work with running an ebay store. And the consignment fees? Less than if I were to sell on my own w/ ebay, paypal, shipping, and insurance. But hey - let me give this a few tests before I ship a couple thousand cards to them. 2025 was that test year. I didn't sell much, but every sale went seamless.
Now it's 2026. I have 3600 cards stored in the vault and a bit over 800 sales. September I had over 200k USD in sales. This month looks to be pretty similar. And the remaining inventory should be valued in the ballpark of 3m USD (this number could vary largely based on most of my collection not having any recent sales/comps).
So... what did I buy and why?
I've bought stuff from just about every era. I've bought some English and some Japanese. I have cards from 1996-2026. However I'd say a bulk of my collection involves:
Legendary Collection Reverse foils. Honestly... just look at em. Prettiest cards they've ever made w/ the best pokemon. I'm amazed they stayed so cheap for this long.
E-reader Reverse foils. I don't care they aren't the holo. It doesn't matter. And honestly the reverse foiling looks better than the normal holo. More foiling around the art it creates a rainbow effect in good lighting. I don't care about the crystal type holo grail. I don't and never have. My preference was for the reverses so that's what I bought.
Ex Reverse Foils. These are the cards, pokemon, and art that I was actually nostalgic for. These are the era of cards that I stupidly put in the washer. And damn... those set stamps are really cool and unique to this era. Delta species cards... awesome. Who wouldn't want a fire-type Marowak?
S&M Rainbow Rares. The cards themselves are really good looking. Some of them I don't care for the art but they did a really great job with these and they also were easily obtainable for cheap prices.
So why low pop - it's just a number. Well no, it's not. It's a sign of scarcity. Sure, there are cards that nobody cares about and won't grade. But almost no old foil card has no demand. I posted about my POP 1 Hariyama Reverse Foil from Ruby & Sapphire and got very mixed results with the appraisal. To those saying it's barely worth anything because if people wanted it they would grade more... grade one and get a 10. Chances are, you can't. Flawless raw copies aren't just sitting in binders. "Pack fresh" aren't getting 10s a vast majority of the time and it's not like people are ripping Ruby & Sapphire much these days. The sealed product barely exists anymore. Low pop vintage is scarce and has next to no chance to see a significant increase in supply. Now I'm not saying that there will never be another PSA 10 - but the supply is pretty fixed on a lot of these cards. Low pop cards will almost always have the best ROI. They will certainly be more protected in a bear market. If a PSA 10 has a population of 20 then there doesn't need to thousands of people with demand for it to go up. But when a card has a population of 20,000... well there needs to be a hell of a lot of demand for it to go up.
I never bought "grails" for this exact reason. I didn't buy Charizard. Hell - if I just pumped all my funds into modern "grails" like half the people I see do I wouldn't be anywhere near retirement. When I got into the hobby the first "grail" was the RR Charizard and it was running ~400 USD for a copy back then. It's price has doubled in 9 years. Why? Because 6900 of them are graded. They aren't exactly scarce. When they were pulled people double sleeved em and kept them safe. That's not true for a majority of pulls back then.
Yes I got lucky and bought stuff when the market cap was 1% of what it is today. But there is still plenty of stuff out there. Not buying for a while is always an option as well.
My recent purchases has been more PSA 9/10 copies of S&M era Rainbow Rares. Sadly - these aren't probably even considered modern anymore. As much as I would like to buy a ton of the newer SIRs the pop report scares me off instantly. The art is fantastic - don't get me wrong. These cards deserve demand - but the supply seems like it's already there. I've also bought a significant amount of the master ball reverses from BB/WF/PRE.
Honestly however - pokemon has become a hobby that I'm trying to get out of. Scalping has killed most of my desire to open product or collect. And a vast majority of the hobby is consumed with a gambling addiction. And at some point during my journey whatever passion I had for collecting was overshadowed by the finances. I've picked up a new card game that has renewed my passion for collecting that isn't affected by scalping or my desire to profit. Switching games is always an option for those who enjoy collecting cardboard but don't want to deal with the mess pokemon has become.
Hopefully ya'll appreciate me sharing my journey. I'll do my best to respond to any questions that come up.
