>>46371561It was a bit of a snowball effect. Covid made bored people look into pokemon again, people saw that some old cards and packs were pricey, they sold the cards then and made good money, more and more people realize/do this, people see streamers and youtubers doing this and getting a lot of attention, eventually these same people realize a lot of people still collect and that now even more people were trying to collect with all their newly disposable income, so then they not only buy up a ton of product, they upsell the product and cards as well, they realize people will pay higher prices, they then begin buying as much product as possible to create a false 'shortage' and upsell even higher, people still buy, so now they buy literally everything in bulk and triple prices.
This has fucked mostly everything out of print, but tcpi is trying to combat this with currently in print sets by ramping up production as soon as they can. It sucks, but at least modern, in print sets will be getting saved shortly. But prepare for the next couple 25th anniversary releases, because if you decide you want some you've got to utterly snipe them for market otherwise you'll be paying 3x or more for anything
